It was an inside job.
East Mountain proved Rio Chadde and Miles Parscal’s slumpbuster, as the posts combined for 32 points to shepherd the Magdalena boys basketball team to a 69-31 thrashing over the visiting Timberwolves.
Against another team, it might have mattered.
Against East Mountain, it was just a meaningless statistic. The Magdalena girls basketball team missed seven layups in the second quarter — not counting putbacks — but that was after it established a comfortable cushion.
Hell or high water might have been more conquerable.
It didn’t take the Socorro High boys basketball team more than four and a half minutes to seize control of Tuesday’s District 3-3A pillow fight on the way to a 64-17 win over visiting Cobre.
Two shots.
One half.
Essentially, that’s all it took for the Magdalena boys basketball team (15-6, 3-0) to put away Estancia (5-12, 1-4) in Thursday night’s District 3-2A encounter.
This is it.
That was the name of Michael Jackson’s farewell tour that, as it turns out, quite literally foreshadowed the King of Pop’s unceremonious demise. He died from cardiac arrest three weeks before he was slated to take the stage in a series of career-closing concerts.
The quintessential Warrior.
Ask those who know Ibrahim Maiga best, and that’s the response you’ll get.
The boxing gym, like its occupants, is raw, unpolished and packed with potential.
Once a bar, the building, across the street from Sedillo Park, has been completely gutted — its innards showing.
When everyone else was slumping, the sophomore rose to the occasion.
Zeb Esquivel scored seven of his 13 points in the fourth quarter of Friday night’s game at Silver, keying the motor-less Socorro boys basketball team’s run that just came up a mile short of its preferred destination.
If only the Magdalena boys basketball team hit more shots.
If only the Steers didn’t dig themselves a 10-point, first-quarter deficit.
If only they didn’t turn the ball over that one possession, or secured the rebound on that other one.
The Mojavian drought hasn’t subsided.
You could almost hear Drowning Pool’s “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" in the background.”
“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.”
~Ernest Hemingway
The night essentially started with Dezirae Armijo on the free-throw line. And it ended that way, too.
It wasn’t so much that the Quemado boys basketball team regressed. It was that Magdalena progressed, hardened by rough-and-tumble games throughout the year, including a pair of affairs against ranked opponent Shiprock.
This far into the prep basketball season, there aren't any more shape-shifters. It's pretty evident who is who, as teams have, for the most part, cemented their identities. What follows is a midseason report card of the teams in and around Socorro County.
It was prep basketball’s equivalent of death by lethal injection.
Know that old saying about sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you?
Van Romero's tongue-in-cheek comment got me thinking.
It was Pizzazz vs. Patience, two warring styles involved in a culture clash of epic proportions in an ear-splitting environment.
With four minutes and change left in Saturday’s game, Amanda Saenz drove the lane, put a nifty spin move on a West Las Vegas defender and then proceeded to miss a wide-open layup.
