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Sports

Comeback Kids: Germantown Tops Roxborough

The Bears made up a nine-point deficit in the final five minutes for their second straight win over the Indians.

With their 56-50 double-overtime Dec. 11 win over Roxborough fresh in their opponents' memory, the Bears figured they would have a battle on their hands Tuesday afternoon when the Indians came to town.

They were right.

Germantown High School topped visiting Roxborough 53-51 in a back-and-forth thriller that saw the Bears make up a nine-point deficit with under five-minutes remaining.

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The Bears were paced by Tahron Fitzhugh's 18 points, while the Indians also got 18 from Rashawn Anderson.

Germantown head coach Matt Wahl was visibly releived to have, for the second time this season, slid by a dangerous Roxborough team.

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"We definitely don't make things easy on ourselves," he said, before praising his team's resilience.

After scoring only nine points the first 12 minutes of the second half, his Bears rallied to score 13 in the game's final four minutes.

"It was all about the fast break-points and the points off turnovers [down the stretch]," the second-year coach said.

The losing coach, Terrell Burnett, concurred with that analysis–to an extent.

"We turned the ball over a lot of times at the end there. You can't do that and win," said Burnett. The Indians coach went on to say that it wasn't the Germantown pressure that swayed the outcome, but his own team's failure to execute.

"We've got plays for [the press]," he said.

Whether the fault was strategy or execution, the result was the same for the Indians: Another loss.

After entering the third period down 31-27, Roxborough clamped down defensively, got some tough and timely offensive rebounds from forward Montrel Thompkins and went on a 21-9 run to take a nine-point lead into the back end of the final period. It wasn't enough.

"We just gave up," said Thompkins after the game. "We didn't work together at the end."

The brilliant play of Germantown's Fitzhugh had something to do with that breakdown.

Every time the Bears needed a play on Tuesday, their captain stepped up and provided it. Fitzhugh got the go-ahead points for Germantown when, with three seconds left in regulation and the score knotted at 51, he took a pass from Woyne McFarland and finished in traffic to give the Bears the lead for the first time since the opening seconds of the period.

The Bears leading scorer gave all the credit to the fans.

"The crowd got us going," he said. "Their hype, their intensity, they carried us."

The Bears improved to 7-8 on the season, while the Indians fell to 5-11.

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Final Roxborough 13 14 10 14 51 Germantown 14 17 7 15 53 Roxborough Points Germantown Points A. Hinton 9 R. Brinkley 8 R. Anderson 18 W. Reid 2 L. Lewis 3 K. Davis 2 D. Holland 10 W. McFarland 15 D. Williams 3 T. Fitzhugh 18 M. Thompkins 8 W. Parks 7 C. Bailey 1
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