Noblitt’s hot hand nudges Oakville into title game

COLUMBIA – It was good the moment it left his hands.

Josh Noblitt caught the ball on the right wing and released one of nature’s rarest sights.

An indoor rainbow.

The ball skied high into the Mizzou Arena here and gracefully plummeted back towards earth. It poured through the net sending the Oakville boys basketball team into overtime and its fans into a frenzy.

Knotted at 41-41, the Tigers and Christian Brothers College had some unfinished business in the Class 5 semifinal Thursday night thanks to Noblitt.

Oakville would win the game 47-44 and lose the championship two nights later to Springfield: Hillcrest.

But the Tigers, 27-5, never would have had the chance had Noblitt not played the hero. The Journal Athlete of the Week, the 5-foot-10, 165-pounder hit six of his eight 3-pointers and scored a game-high 18 points.

“When that shot went through we thought we had won the game, we had all the momentum,” Noblitt said.

For a guy who put up a bagel in Oakville’s quarterfinal thrashing of Parkway West and didn’t shoot the ball particularly well after the district semifinals, Noblitt, 18, found his stroke when the Tigers needed it most.

He said he spent the days between the quarterfinals and the final four recalibrating his jump shot.

“My shot had been off,” he said. “I tried to exaggerate the arch and shoot rainbows.”

The Mizzou Arena was also kind to Noblitt. The venue is so different than anywhere else he plays you’d think it might bother him. But it had the opposite effect.

“There are no walls behind the hoop, the rims are soft, the lights are bright,” he said. “Everything is so different.”

To be as high as the Tigers were Thursday, they came crashing down Saturday night after Hillcrest won the championship 54-49.

The hardest part for Noblitt was not losing the game, but saying goodbye to his teammates. A senior-laden group, the Tigers put together the two best seasons ever seen at Oakville. Never before had the program advanced to the state semifinals. Now, Noblitt and friends had done it two years in a row, and Oakville had a fourth- and second-place plaques for t he trophy case.

But saying goodbye is never easy. Noblitt admitted that, even before they took the court for the championship, part of him was sad. Regardless of the outcome, he and his longtime friends would no longer be a team. Win or lose, they would go their separate ways.

“You’re feeling like this is the last time you’ll play together,” he said. “It was pretty hard. Don’t get me wrong, it would have been a lot better if we had won.”