Andy’s Take

By any objective measure, when describing the 2022-23 Lancaster Lebanon League boys’ basketball season in all its totality, you’d have to say it was largely shaded in some sort of hue resembling that of success. After all, we bore witness to more than a few storylines that will surely resonate around the local hoops landscape […]

First of all, regardless of what the eventual outcome was going to be at the end of 32 minutes of play Friday afternoon at Hershey’s Giant Center, let’s not make any mistake about it. This season for the Lancaster Mennonite Blazers quickly went from promising in the preseason, sensational during the season, historical during the […]

At last check, the state of Pennsylvania is estimated to have a population of just under 13 million residents residing inside its borders. Beyond that, there are a whopping 715 schools across the commonwealth who field high school boys’ basketball teams. However, even for a state that covers over 46,000 square miles with a population […]

There’s a phrase out there that says, “Two things can be true at once.” Simple and innocuous, yes, but never has a quote personified a high school boys’ basketball team more than this 2022-23 Lancaster Mennonite bunch perhaps. Yes, while it remains as true as ever that making your conference tournament, winning three-straight district championships, […]

Death, taxes, and Hempfield Basketball making a deep run in the state playoffs. Okay, maybe that’s not the exact the verbiage of the phrase, but as far as a local audience is most concerned, it isn’t a notion all that farfetched. Remember if you will to a time not all that long ago, say five, […]

While the logic of it all may seem a little bit unconventional at least on the surface, sometimes the best medicine that a team can find for itself is getting firmly pushed up against the metaphorical ropes while tasked with having only two options– to either sink or swim. And if ever there was a […]

There’s no denying it. There is just something intrinsically special about the state basketball tournament. After all, while the Twitter debates, looking at unscientific polls and everything of the like are fun in the interim, having the opportunity to settle the score as for who and what pockets of the commonwealth are truly the best […]

When you reach this stage, that of course being the highest level of achievement as far as high school basketball inside the mid-state is concerned with the dandy dozen known as the District 3 championships, you typically would like if the occasion would be rather large and significant in stature. Shall we say historic even? […]

Full disclosure, but we must start this piece by laying out an inquiry that most in basketball circles would consider to be completely blasphemous given the months of hard work that each team puts in year-round to try and reach this particular summit. Even still, we must ask—Was it possible that Tuesday afternoon’s District 3-2A […]

When you reach this point of the season where the month of March is literally only a handful of hours away and the basketball postseason is only heating up with even more fervor, this is usually when Cinderella typically awakes from her slumber. Now sure, while underdogs with their can-do narratives typically end up stealing […]

If it’s true what they say that the truest mark of someone’s character is how they respond in the aftermath of adversity, you can best believe that the Hempfield Black Knights boys’ basketball team has done plenty of that and then some over the last few years. But also, it’s possible that two things can […]

Before we begin, is there a word for déjà vu that doesn’t exactly come to completion? Say, kinda vu? Either way, that likely had to be the feeling that the Warwick Warriors possessed when they loaded up the bus in Lititz on Thursday afternoon before coming across the Susquehanna to meet up with the Mechanicsburg […]

There are some out there who will say that the postseason is in theory a “second season.” Or, more succinctly put, a second chance to try and make amends for previous shortcomings that occurred earlier during the season. And man alive, did Cedar Crest’s trip over to Wilson on Tuesday night fit ever that description […]

When we make comments that usually are along the lines of “The future of Lancaster-Lebanon League boys’ basketball is incredibly bright,” yes, while we may indirectly be talking about the players inside of the conference most specifically, it’d be extremely foolish to overlook the work of the many young coaches that the league can also […]

In order to accurately move forward in helping to better tell this story, we must first go back. Like two years’ worth of going back that is. Sure, while seeing the Hempfield Black Knights emerge to the surface of the eventual Lancaster-Lebanon League title game isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon by any stretch of the […]