For 23 and a half minutes Monday night, the Northampton boys basketball team played nearly flawless basketball. They showed the potential this team has to repeat as EPC champions and perhaps win the program’s first district title in over 50 years.

They led Allentown Central Catholic 45-27 as the third quarter drew to a close. However, the Vikings scored the last four points of that period and the first 9 of the fourth to cut the seemingly insurmountable lead to 45-40 with 3:46 left to play.

A pair of Leo Regec free throws broke a 5-minute scoreless drought for the Kids, but Central outscored the home team 6-1 over the next 92 seconds to whittle the lead down to 48-46 with 1:18 remaining in regulation.

Northampton was resilient down the stretch, forcing the Vikings to miss their final four shots of the game. Ethan Raphun and Brady Simock combined for three free throws and Jake Raysely added a layup to give the K-Kids a big 53-46 win.

Simock spoke about standing on the charity stripe with the game in the balance, “I don’t feel the pressure. I want to be the one on the line at the end of the game. I have confidence that I’m going to make both and I did.”

Noah Walakovits, who shared top scoring honors with Regec with 13 points, offered his perspective, “We almost played a complete, which is what we’re looking to do. The pressure was getting to us, but me as a captain, Brady as a captain, we had to get everyone composed to finish it out.”

Head coach Matt Scholl described the process of getting the team back on track in the fourth quarter, “Your heart rate goes up, you make dumb decisions, you lose the fundamentals. You hope you have timeouts left. Tell them to calm down and tell them to get back to what we do in practice because it works. We have seniors and they figured it out.”

Northampton’s record stands at 11-3 overall and 9-1 in the EPC and atop the Northampton County Division. They have already clinched a berth in the district playoffs and stand fourth in the 6A power ranking behind PM West, Allen, and Nazareth.

The next milestone for the team is to wrap up a spot in the EPC playoffs as a top-4 seed to earn a home game that will hopefully vault them back to the PPL Center with an opportunity to defend their conference title.

Northampton 12-15-18-8 53

Allentown C.C. 10-5-16-15 46

Northampton Scoring: Noah Walakovits 13, Leo Regec 13, Brady Simock 12, Jake Raysely 10, Ethan Raphun 3, Korbin Sollars 2