Video: Heads up play by Khalil Edney wins ‘ship

Over the last 3:50 in the New York State Section 1 Class AA high school championship game New Rochelle had outscored their opponents from Mount Vernon 9:1 to get within two points, 58:60, with just 2.9 seconds left on the clock. New Rochelle had one last chance at winning the game as they had the ball and were faced with an in-bounds play. The thing is, they were on the opposite end of the court…

Senior Khalil Edney was tasked with bringing the ball in and the plan was to throw it as far as he could to a teammate, hope for a clean catch with an opening to get a shot off and, depending on where the ball was caught, win or tie the game. Sounds easy enough, right? We’ve all seen it before: the Russians beating the US in the controversial 1972 Olympics Gold medal game in Munich on a full-court pass and shot at the buzzer, Duke beating Kentucky in overtime in the 1992 NCAA championship with 2.1 seconds on the clock and a full-court pass and shot at the buzzer, and the list can go on. This one played out a bit differently than a simple catch and shoot as three players touched the ball, the shot was originally waved off until the referees huddled and made a call (they did not look at a replay, but they did get it right). As you’ll see in the video below, Edney threw his pass just over half-court it was tipped up, caught by a Mount Vernon player, who instead of holding it to run the clock off, lobbed it to a teammate standing down by the arc near their basket. That pass was picked off by Edney, who, instead of standing and watching the play unfold, had run on to the court. As he grabbed the pass, he launched a shot that left his hand a split second before time ran out, it travelled 3/4 of the length of the court and hit nothing but the bottom of the net.

Edney was listed as questionable for Sunday’s game due to rolling his ankle in the semifinals on Saturday, but as he stated in a post-game interview, it was the championship and he just had to play through the pain. You hate to hear about kids playing through pain that could cause further damage, especially a kid like Edney who’s getting offers to play football, but somehow this result seems to put all that on the back burner…

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