With his team down by three points and with the very real possibility looming that only 12.8 seconds remained in Orange Park's basketball season, senior point guard Jerome Clyburn brought the ball up court for what could be the last time in his Raider career.
As he neared DeLand's basket, and as the clock seemingly raced toward the end, he remembered what his teammate Tony Baker said: "I'm hot."
Orange Park's Tony Baker might have been feverish, but he was also hot.
Baker, who was suffering from the flu heading into Thursday night's regional quarterfinal at Orange Park, could have been talking about his temperature, but Clyburn decided to whip the ball across court to him anyway, and with five ticks left from the top of the arc, Baker went up and launched a three-point shot that would decide the Raiders' season.
Orange Park will play next Tuesday.
Baker's shot "just took the wind right out of DeLand," head coach Daryl Lauderdale said of the perfectly arced shot that slid through the net to tie the game at 67. And all that wind went must have blown right into the sick senior Raiders' lungs, because throughout the overtime period Baker became a one-man Bulldog wrecking crew, scoring six points and grabbing four crucial defensive rebounds that helped shut the visiting team out in the last four minutes and give Orange Park a 78-67 victory that puts it in the regional semifinals.
"I'll tell you what, he was absolutely, miserably sick," Lauderdale said of his star of the game. "We had to take him out like every couple of minutes. He sucked it up, but he couldn't breath, he couldn't swallow, he was dehydrated. But he kept wanting to get back in. I just can't say enough great things about Tony. He showed a lot of character and a lot of heart. Absolutely."
Clyburn knew "his partner in crime" was pretty sick, but that didn't matter.
"All I heard in the back of my mind was Tony saying, 'Jerome, I'm hot.' So I just left it to him," Clyburn said. "That's what our team is about. We're a family and we play hard together, and we win together."
Baker admitted he was an unlikely hero for this game, given his illness.
"I was feeling kind of wheezy," he said. "Truthfully, I thought I was going to cough up a lung a couple of times. ... But I knew the game was close by the end of the game, and I just had to suck it up at the end. Can't come out no more. So I sucked it up."
Baker has five days to recover before he and the Raiders have to suck it up and play one of their toughest foes of the season for a fourth time. Mandarin (22-5) defeated Flagler Palm Coast Thursday night and will be at Orange Park's Dome at 7 p.m. on Tuesday for the Region 1 semifinal game.
Tuesday night's game was close throughout. In fact, the 11-point winning margin was by far the widest lead of the contest.
Orange Park set the tempo in the first quarter, but the Bulldogs held close, and senior, 6-6 post man Ray Graham, the games leading scorer with 23 points, polished off a slam dunk at the end of the first period to give DeLand a 21-20 lead.
From that point on, it seemed like the Bulldogs set the pace, but the Raiders never let them get more than five points ahead, and the closed the game to one point, 37-36, at the half.
With DeLand about to finish the third period two points ahead, Clyburn (16 points) pulled off a little heroics of his own, hitting a three-pointer at the buzzer from just inside mid-court to give the Raiders a 51-50 advantage heading into the last period.
But the runnin' Raiders didn't come out running in the fourth. Clyburn took the ball to half court and just held it.
Asked about the slow-down tactic, Lauderdale said it was just one of those things he "felt."
"I knew there was going to be a lot of hindsight about it after the game," Lauderdale said. "But to heck with hindsight, ya know? Everybody's got a different game plan except for what I feel. And I get feelings for things, and it's worked 25, 26 times this year, and, ya know, I've got to go with my gut reaction. Sometimes I don't make decision, I just go, 'If I feel it, we do it.' If it works, I'm a genius. If it doesn't ..., well, I'm still a genius," he laughed.
It did work, for a while, and it helped the Raiders take a 58-52 lead with just under five minutes to play. But DeLand's freshman three-point shooter Dennis Diaz scored five of his 14 points and Graham showed why he will be attending Embry-Riddle University next year as he made two quick fakes under the OP basket to help the Bulldogs tie the game at 60 with 1:55 to play.
Ironically, Baker set up his heroic, game-tying three-pointer to send the game into overtime when he missed the front end of a one-and-one free throw attempt with 34 seconds left in regulation.
But, after all, he was sick.
Other scorers for the Raiders were Clarence Tillman (12), David Marlar (11), Tyler Robbins (10), Sammy Mojica (6), and Ivan Howard (2).