It was no secret that David Showman was feeling it.

After hitting his fourth 3-pointer of the night in the third quarter to give Wheaton Warrenville South a double-digit lead over Batavia in the Class 4A regional final at Willowbrook, the junior went to the bench for a timeout.

Once there, he locked eyes with coach Mike Healy, who gave just one piece of advice before addressing the team.

“He told me that I needed to keep my composure and had to take smart shots,” Showman said. “I had to let it come to me and not try to force anything. I knew I’d get the right shots. And when I get the chance, I’ll knock them down.”

And much like he did for most of the contest, the offensive output flowed through him naturally.

Showman finished the night with 33 points, leading the fifth-seeded Tigers to take down the fourth-seeded Bulldogs for the second time in three games with a 59-49 victory, this one clinching the Tigers’ fourth regional title in five years.

“David was just going, and our guys just found him,” Healy said. “He was just so strong for us around the basket. We’re not really a post-touch type of team, but we though that we could get him and (sophomore) AJ Rogers down there. Those two were tough, but what David did there was pretty special.”

The Tigers (22-10) will face top-seeded Glenbard East in a Bartlett Sectional semifinal at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

“I’m just so proud of these guys,” Healy said. “I’m happy for them. We talked about it before the game that we wanted to get four more days together, and we got it.”

Showman got the offense going early on in the contest, going 7 of 8 from the floor early on, including back-to-back 3-pointers in the first quarter. He finished the first half with 18 points to give them a 30-26 lead into halftime.

“After the first points, I knew that it was going to be me all game,” Showman said. “I needed to be making shots, and for us to win the game I needed to get hot. So I just kept getting the ball and kept doing whatever I could with it.”

Besides Showman and Rogers (11 points), the Tigers got key production off the bench, with seniors Brady Robinson (eight points) and Ethan Farrell (seven points) adding clutch baskets.

“Both of them came up huge,” Healy said. “One of the things I love about these guys is that we always go with the hot hand, and they each did some good stuff for us.”

WW South ended up changing the tide of the contest in the third quarter, when the Tigers came out on a 9-2 run to push the lead to 39-28. Before the run, no team had led by more than four points.

“We were a lot better in the second half there of getting out to their shooters,” Healy said. “We knew that if they were going to beat us, they were going to have to go into the lane.”

Batavia (21-10) did not stop with the 3-point attempts in the second half. After going 6 of 12 from beyond the arc in the first half, the Bulldogs only managed to go 4 of 16 in the second half.

“The game is what it is, and it was what it was,” Bulldogs coach Jim Nazos said. “I just feel like I miscoached them. It’s the harshest reality in life that all good things come to an end, and when it does, it sucks.

“There’s tons to be proud of from this group. They just won’t feel it right now.”

Junior Dane Farrar led the team in scoring with 13 points, with senior Joe Reid right behind with 11 points. The Bulldogs finished the season as winners of 16 of their last 19 after starting the season 5-7.

“This was just one of those dream teams to coach,” Nazos said. “Everybody just put their heads together to figure things out. You kind of get the feeling as a coach that they’re coaching themselves, and you can see that they’re all in, and they were.

“They’ve earned the right to feel this down after a loss. But in a couple of days, or even a month from now, they’ll look back on this season and they’ll be proud.”