Chaminade gets it done in CHSAA final against St. Anthony's

Let’s flash back to the night of March 3, 2022. Chaminade owned a late two-point lead but turned it over on a three-point play with 10.9 seconds left in OT and dropped the NSCHSAA championship game to Holy Trinity by that single, painful point.

Now the top-seeded Flyers, with their 11 returnees, were back on the same basketball court inside Hofstra’s Mack Sports Complex nearly a year later, trying to write a better ending for themselves in Tuesday night’s championship game, this time against No. 3 St. Anthony’s.

And they found a way, pitching a shutout over the final 6 1/2 minutes and pulling free in the final three. A second title in three years was theirs with a 43-35 victory.

“This is amazing,” said senior guard Dave DeBusschere, who was named the league’s player of the year afterward. “Honestly, last year, watching them celebrate, it was heartbreaking. But this year, being the one celebrating, all the work that we put in to capitalize on our senior years, it’s just incredible.”

Joe Knaus scored 14 points, championship MVP Antoni Vlogianitis contributed nine and DeBusschere added eight.

So Chaminade (23-3) will play in the state CHSAA Class A semifinals against Bishop Timon-St. Jude of Buffalo (23-3) at 3 p.m. on  Saturday at Hilbert College in Hamburg. The program’s last state title came in 2003.

“We definitely have the talent this year,” DeBusschere said. “Yeah, we’re fighting for that.”

But the roots for the Flyers being in this position stem back to last year’s NSCHSAA final.

“We had a preseason meeting,” coach Dan Feeney said. “We watched the last 30 seconds of overtime as a group. We promised ourselves that’s the last time we’ll watch it but we’ll remember it. We put the iPad away, burned the tape, essentially.

“We wouldn’t bring it up, but something that we would always bring up is: ‘Are we collectively better than we were last year?’ ”  

They answered the question one more time after the Friars’ Korey Duff Jr. hit a jumper in the lane for the last two of his team-high 11 points, cutting the Flyers’ lead to 36-35 with 6:33 left.

“Our defense has always kept us in the game, and I think it did again tonight,” St. Anthony’s coach Sal Lagano said.

But Chaminade had been working on its defense. It showed.

Plus, Knaus buried a three with 2:55 left, Bradley Wyckoff hit a one-hander in the lane and DeBusschere drove for two to complete the Flyers’ 7-0 closing run.

“We knew last year we were one play away,” Vlogianitis said. “We knew this year every play matters.”

St. Anthony’s trailed 13-10 after the first quarter, 22-16 at halftime and 36-31 through three after Vlogianitis hit a long three-pointer late in the period.

The Friars just couldn’t quite catch up. They finished at 19-8.

“You spend so much time with these kids, six days a week, you better like them, and I do,” Lagano said. “It was good. It was fun.”