Girls basketball: Sara Abdul leads Wheaton North to road win at Oswego East

OSWEGO – As Sara Abdul goes, the Wheaton North girls basketball team goes.

The Falcons went to Oswego East for a nonconference game Monday night with Abdul leading the way in a 57-45 victory.

“We know we can make anything happen, especially Sara, she can make anything happen,” Falcons senior Zoey Bohmer said of her junior teammate. “With her driving ability and her passing ability, we’re always there to help her out and finish the ball when she dishes it.”

Abdul led the Falcons with 27 points. She made 11-of-16 free throws.

“This really wasn’t a good game for us,” Abdul said. ”But then we kind of picked it up because we didn’t want to lose. We were rushing too many shots and we knew if we just passed it around we could get a better shot than just forcing it.”

Bohmer added 13 points for the Falcons (16-9), who successfully answered two big rallies by the Wolves, including after Wheaton North’s 34-25 lead midway through the third quarter shrunk to 35-34.

“Obviously I kind of just took it as it came,” she said. “Like I knew from the beginning that it was going to be a good game. We had a quick start but I knew anything could happen, so we kind of took each quarter as its own, played hard, played our game and came out with a win.”

Falling behind by 15 points to start off the game, the Wolves (11-9) finally got things going in the final three minutes of the first half, going on a 9-0 run to pull to within 22-19 after Ava Valek banked in a shot in the final minute.

Oswego East came all the way back to tie the game at 25-25 on Valek’s putback about a minute into the second half.

“We didn’t start out well and then had a good run,” Wolves coach Abe Carretto said. “We got some stops and then we actually put the ball in the hoop a little bit and made our free throws, the few that we had. We wanted to keep fighting and then it was back and forth in the third and then we got the four-point play from Maggie [Lewandowski] and we go down one.”

The Wolves pulled to within 35-34 after Lewandowski made her free throw, but the Falcons answered with eight straight points to close the third quarter.

Wheaton North had a 43-37 lead midway through the fourth quarter before it pulled away. Abdul’s three-point play and a basket on an offensive rebound made it 48-37 with 2:56 remaining.

“We’ve played a lot of games like this,” Bohmer said. “Close games where we have a lead, they catch up and make their run, we make our run and then it’s close in the end. We’re prepared for anything and I think it’s been like that this whole season. We didn’t start out the strongest and I think it took time for us to realize that we had to stay poised with our game. We know we can win anything if we just stay calm and work hard.”

Aubrey Lamberti scored 16 points and Lewandowski had 13 to lead the Wolves.

“We kept fighting in the fourth quarter but there was a lot of stoppages in play with fouls,” Carretto said. “I don’t think that helped.”