GORHAM — For three quarters, it looked like the shooting woes that have nagged the Gorham girls’ basketball team for the first month of the season were going to drag the Rams to a frustrating defeat.
Instead, a perfectly timed turnaround earned them their biggest victory of the young season.
Ellie Gay scored 15 points, including nine in the fourth, and Summer Gammon added nine to help Gorham erase an eight-point third-quarter deficit to defeat Thornton Academy 38-34 on Tuesday night.
It wasn’t a statement victory so much as an escape, a notion Coach Laughn Berthiaume acknowledged afterward.
“We did just enough to win,” he said. “It is frustrating when shots aren’t going in. But I think when shots aren’t going in, you’ve got to do some other things to win those toughness points. I wouldn’t say we had a whole bunch of them, but we had enough.”
The first meeting since the Rams’ upset 44-41 victory in last year’s AA South final wasn’t pretty, but it was still good enough to take down one of the state’s best teams and put Gorham (4-2) atop the region.
“For our confidence, that’s good,” Gammon said. “Definitely not our best game we played, and definitely not our best game we’re going to play, but I think getting a win on the board was nice for the whole team.”
It got dicey, particularly when Emma Lizotte (15 points, 18 rebounds) had a putback to make it 26-18 Thornton (6-2) with around two minutes to go in the third. Gorham was moving the ball well on offense but unable to find the basket, be it with spot-up shots, short jumpers or transition layups.
And then, it clicked. Gay hit a 3-pointer on the first shot of the fourth quarter and followed it up with a transition basket, and after Julia Reed scored a layup of her own, Gay converted a three-point play off a steal to make it 30-26 Gorham with 6:23 to play.
“It was much needed,” Gay said. “We’re a much better shooting team than what we shot tonight. As much as we’ve played together in the past, and we have roughly the same team as last year, we still need to get in the groove.”
Thanks to baskets from Lizotte and Addisen Sulikowski (13 points), Thornton was able to stay close, and gained possession down only 36-34 with a minute left.
That was when Gammon made her biggest play of the game, deflecting a pass and gathering the ball for a steal with 50 seconds left. A pair of Reed free throws iced the win.
“I know I have the length on a lot of people I defend,” Gammon said. “In that moment, we needed to be the most aggressive we were all game, so I was just going after it.”
Gammon had seven points, five rebounds and five steals in the second half.
“She can handle the ball like a guard, we put her in the post sometimes,” Berthiaume said. “I think her versatility is definitely something that’s key for us.”
The Trojans were without standout sophomore point guard Kylie Lamson, who hurt her ankle in the previous game against Windham, which Coach Suzanne Rondeau said left them more vulnerable against Gorham’s pressure.
“We didn’t do a lot in the half-court offense like we should have,” Rondeau said. “We went on a run, and instead of settling in and running something, we kind of turned the ball right over. We played the pace they wanted us to play.”
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