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West Chicago loses to East Aurora

The milestone scoring mark and the strong rally from down 10 points in the second half were nice, but the finish Friday night, not so much.

West Chicago and senior Mikey Bibbs did some nice things in their Upstate Eight Conference Valley Division battle with East Aurora, but just not over the final 1½ minutes as the Tomcats scored the night's final six points to claim a 63-61 victory.

Visiting East Aurora built a 52-42 lead in the third quarter only to have first-place West Chicago fight back to claim a 61-57 lead following a pair of free throws from Jason Gimre with 1:33 left to play.

But down the stretch the Wildcats (19-6, 6-3) committed two costly turnovers, couldn't box out East Aurora's Ronald McBride following a Tomcats' miss, and then trailing 63-61 in the final seconds missed on two attempts.

"We made a lot of mistakes the final two minutes," said Mikey Bibbs, who topped the 1,000-point mark in the first half and finished the game with 17 points. "We did some nice things, but if we don't make those mistakes we might have won by about six points."

After McBride connected on four straight free throws to tie the game at 61-61 with 41.1 seconds left, a strip steal by East Aurora's Michael Stewart led to a Franklin Montgomery reverse layup with 20 seconds remaining. When West Chicago then misfired twice just prior to the buzzer, the Tomcats had pulled off a big surprise.

"No they didn't play like a last-place team," said Wildcats coach Bill Recchia, whose team maintained a share of the league lead because Glenbard East fell to West Aurora. "Take nothing away from what they did. But there were too many missed opportunities on our part."

Six players dropped in 3-pointers for East Aurora (9-16, 2-7), with McBride leading the attack at 18 points and freshman guard Traevon Brown adding a pair of 3s and 9 points.

"We're playing well together as a team now. Early in the year we had some issues and some problems and we didn't focus and play as a team," Tomcats coach Wendell Jeffries said. "We didn't play like a last-place team tonight. They responded to our initial punch like a first-place team, but Michael Stewart had that big knock away steal and Franklin Montgomery had the finish.

When you win a 2-point game, there's a lot of huge plays down the stretch.

For West Chicago, Peter Dolan had 13 points and Tai Bibbs was held to one field goal but still managed 8 points and 6 rebounds.

Mikey Bibbs liked his team's fight after falling behind by 10 in the third quarter, but the tough loss made it difficult to celebrate topping the 1,000-point mark.

"We know we're going to fight back and we know we're a good team and we're not going to let teams trample over us," he said. "It definitely would have been better to get it (milestone) in a win. A loss like this hits pretty hard."

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