Swampscott victorious on 'return' to Garden

Jack Hughes is one who can truly appreciate what it means to lace up his sneakers and play on the fabled parquet floor at the Garden.

He's been there. Not as a 32-minute-per game starter. But as a reserve, one whose moment lasted exactly one minute, 40 years ago, for the Swampscott High boys' basketball team.

So as his Swampscott High girls' squad was wrapping up its 67-51 victory over Archbishop Williams in Monday's Division 3 state semifinal, he made sure that all 15 of his players had their moment too.

"Back then it was different. You had to win 70 percent of your games to get into the tournament and every game was played in the Boston Garden," said Hughes, of his experience on the 1968 Swampscott squad.

"In the first game I got in for one minute. But I didn't get in the championship game against Braintree, which we won on a buzzer-beater. I wanted them to be able to say years from now 'I played on the Garden floor; it wasn't long but I played on it,' " he said.

Swampscott played perennial Central power Quaboag Regional in yesterday's state final.

Senior forward Allie Beaulieu, who netted a game-high 23 points in Monday night's win, was thrilled to see that all of her teammates were able to get onto the floor.

"[Hughes] told us he was a team player. He didn't even play one minute in the championship game but he felt so involved with the team," said Beaulieu, a 1,000-point scorer who will play at Bates next season.

"He was trying to say 'We're a team and everyone on the team counts.' It's so true. I love all my teammates. It's good coaching on his part, because every girl on the team deserved to have a chance to play in the Garden," she said.

But perhaps one reason Swampscott got there in the first place was because team members never got hung up on all the storylines surrounding their season.

A Swampscott team had lost on at least three other occasions at the Garden. But this season, the Big Blue buried the ghosts.

After losing to Pentucket the previous two seasons in the North final, Swampscott bounced the Sachems, 61-46, to earn its trip to Boston. The win at the Garden was the school's first EMass title, for either boys or girls, since 1968.

"I didn't even know half those stories," said Beaulieu, who collected five of the team's 19 steals in Monday's win after scoring 20 points in the North Sectional final. "We just go out there and play."

While Beaulieu and junior guard Kara Gilberg (22 points) led the team offensively on Monday night, they are by no stretch the team's biggest scoring threat. That title belongs to senior forward Tara Nimkar, who before tallying 17 points against Archbishop Williams became the program's all-time leading scorer in the North Sectional final.

"She's one of the best players ever to play for Swampscott," Hughes said. "She's multidimensional, she's only 5-9 maybe, if you stretch her, but she can cover the perimeter and post people up. Up to this year she pretty much was a post person. This year we changed the offense because of the players we had and she became a perimeter person and she really took off. She's just a great shooter [who] drives the ball to hoop extremely hard. It just fit her perfectly and then when we needed to we could post her up."

Both Beaulieu and Nimkar were freshmen playing varsity when the team last played at the Garden, losing to Cardinal Spellman.

Nimkar said it was "truly amazing" to have the exact opposite feeling after Monday's Garden game than the one she felt three years earlier. And by Tuesday morning, everyone at school knew their story too.

"It was good seeing everyone in school today and having them congratulate us after seeing how well we did," Nimkar said Tuesday afternoon.

One of the first people to congratulate Hughes after Monday's win was Mike Lynch, the longtime Channel 5 sportscaster who was a sophomore on the '68 championship team. His father, Dick, who still lives in town, was the team's head coach and the squad featured one of the town's all-time great athletes, Dick Jauron, currently the head coach of the Buffalo Bills in the National Football League.

"He came up to congratulate me and we chatted for a bit," Hughes said. "We were the first boys' team to do it with his father's team and this is the first girls' team to do it."

Flipping through the yellow game program at the EMass girls' basketball finals on Monday night, it was hard not to be taken aback by what was listed above the last roster on the ledger: "Georgetown (9-15)."

The seven other teams listed in the program - Central Catholic, Brockton, Arlington Catholic, Notre Dame Academy, Swampscott, Archbishop Williams, and Georgetown's opponent in the Division 4 state title game, Millis, combined only had 31 losses headed into Monday's games.

Georgetown entered the tournament with a 5-15 record, but more than made its mark once the postseason tapped off.

The 14th seed knocked off the top three seeds in the North: New Mission, Fenway, Shawsheen in its bracket to advance to Monday's championship game. And while Georgetown ultimately lost to Millis, 60-43, the Royals proved that they belonged.

"A lot of people say that and that doesn't make us happy to hear that," Georgetown coach Barri Ann Alonzo said. "But that put a fire in us, so that's OK. We deserve to be here."

Senior center Haley Gisonno netted a team-high 13 points, but high-scoring senior Taryn O'Connell was limited to 12, after averaging 21 during the regular season and a whopping 29 during the postseason.

"O'Connell is the real deal," Millis coach Dave Fallon said after his team built big cushions several times on Monday only to watch Georgetown rally. "She plays inside-out. They are a good team. They are well-coached. I think they had a lot to do with keeping it within striking distance."

In seventh grade, O'Connell and several other players on her team went to watch Georgetown's girls' team play at the Garden, the last time the Royals had played in the state championship.

"Ever since then we wanted to do it," O'Connell said. "We just didn't have our best game. It's not so much that we lost; it's just over. If you have to end it why not end on the Garden floor."