The third quarter’s final 5.4 seconds in Saturday’s third-place game of the Seneca Shipyard Showdown pretty succinctly summed up how momentum had completely flipped from the Hall Red Devils to the Marquette Crusaders.

Tying the game on a pair of Griffin Dobberstein free throws after trailing the entirety of the first half by as many as 14 points, Marquette was hoping for a stop to carry the sudden tie into the fourth quarter. Instead, the Crusaders got a turnover at mid-court as Easton DeBernardi batted a downcourt pass and tipped it to 6-6 sophomore Luke McCullough.

With time running out, McCullough picked it up on one bounce and launched it from three steps inside the mid-court stripe, sinking a buzzer-beating 3-pointer that gave Marquette its first lead since 2-0, an advantage the Cru never relinquished in an eventual 55-40 stunning of the Red Devils to claim the third-place plaque.

“I don’t remember much. I just kind of threw it up, and it went in,” said McCullough, who finished with a game-high 20 points – 18 of them coming in the second half, two on a two-handed dagger of a slam dunk – to go with an also-game-best eight rebounds.

“I had so much adrenaline, I didn’t really know what to think.”

“The ball came into his hands,” Marquette coach Todd Hopkins said, “and I told him not to shoot a 3, but luckily he didn’t listen to me there. ...

“Hall’s a good ballclub, and obviously we didn’t have a very good second quarter, and that’s a credit to them. But in the first half, I thought [Blayden] kept us in the game within striking distance, and then McCullough had a huge second half.”

Cassel added 15 points and seven rebounds, Alec Novotney nine points and three steals, and Dobberstein eight points and three assists in a game Marquette (9-4) trailed 17-6 at the end of one quarter and 26-12 midway through the second before shooting 52.4% in the second half while limiting Hall to 12.5% shooting and 10 total second-half points.

“In the first half, we just came out slow, had a rough start,” McCullough said. “It took a lot to fight through it.”

Braden Curran finished with team-highs of 13 points, five rebounds and four steals for Hall (8-5), which for the game was outshot 42.6% (20-of-47) to 34.1% (14-of-41) and outrebounded 31-26. Noah Plym added eight points, Chace Sterling seven and Luke Bryant five.

“We talked after the game. Nobody is trying to miss shots,” said Red Devils coach Mike Filippini, who was pleased with his team’s ability to stop a recent trend of slow starts. “We ran the same stuff the second half that we ran in the first half. The ball didn’t go in. ...

“The good news is, now you get a little reset here on our season where we can back to getting practices, and I think that will help us. We’ve just got to stay positive.”

A Red Devils runaway victory looked more likely early than a Marquette come-from-behind one, as Hall put togethers an 11-0 run in the opening quarter punctuated by a Bryant 3-pointer and continued to extend that advantage all the way up to 26-12 and, later, 30-17.

Hall still led comfortably at the half, 30-21, but the Crusaders made things uncomfortable real quick, beginning with a Novotney 3 some two-and-a-half minutes into the third quarter. Dobberstein’s aforementioned two late free throws finally caught the Cru up to the Red Devils at 35-35 with 5.4 ticks left, setting up the unlikely DeBernardi-McCullough team-up for the lead-taking buzzer-beater.

Both teams will take the remainder of 2025 off before meeting again the evening of Saturday, Jan. 3, at Bader Gym in Ottawa.