Glen Strandberg
Sports Editor

This victory could be seen coming from at least two weeks away. As soon as the boys basketball team lost to White Bear Lake, 47-46, on Feb. 20, the 4AAAA Section seedings looked like Forest Lake would get a rematch with the Bears in the opening round of the playoffs, and that was just fine with the Rangers.

Sure enough, Forest Lake drew the No. 4 seed, which meant White Bear and its No. 5 seeding had to face a slightly annoyed Ranger squad on Thursday, March 8, on Forest Lake’s home court.

The Rangers had defeated the Bears by 10 points in January and then suffered through the one-point loss in February, where they saw White Bear come back, and in Forest Lake’s eyes, basically the steal the conference win. This left Rangers head coach Dan Cremisino uncertain of how his team would perform.

Would they show up like a victory was guaranteed, or take the court with a need to prove a point?

“They’re a very nice team,” Cremisino said of White Bear after Forest Lake’s 64-51 win. “They’re strong, they’re big they’re athletic — they can beat us if we don’t play well.

“I thought we’d either blow them out or it would be a tight game, but it was kind of in between there — it was a decent cushion.”

The cushion made a brief appearance at the start of the game, but after the Rangers were up 15-9 by getting offensive rebounds and driving to the basket, they saw White Bear Lake (10-16) peck away at the lead and even go up 27-25 with less than three minutes remaining in the first half.

But as soon as it looked as if the Bears had figured out how to handle Forest Lake and slow down the Ranger offense, the hard-charging, sharpshooting, Robert Gavanda and Brandon Phelps arrived on the scene.

During a two-minute stretch, Phelps finagled his way down the baseline for a lay-up, and then knocked down a monster three-pointer. With momentum and the home crowd fully on board, Gavanda nailed a three-ball from the corner pocket to make it 33-27 in favor of Forest Lake.

“I think we struggled offensively at times, but I thought Phelps came in and gave us a really nice spark,” Cremisino said.

“The big surge was the 8-0 run at the end of the first half.”

That 8-0 run wasn’t just the big surge, it basically changed the game.

“I felt like I could drive better this game,” Phelps said. “I felt like I could take (Alex) Healy a little bit. He had two fouls so I wanted to attack him.”

After halftime, the Rangers built the double-digit cushion that might shrink to six, but there was never a sense that White Bear would get hot and make Cremisino and his boys struggle for the win.

Healy did pick up 14 points in the game, but Matt Hansmann’s defense prevented the Bears’ leading scorer from reaching his 20 points per game average.

“I thought we played pretty well, you know, we finished them off a little bit better than we have in the past,” Cremisino said.

Gavanda and Aaron Jacobs (eight rebounds) shared the Forest Lake scoring honors with 13 points each, while Phelps had 11 and Ryan Brown had 10 points.

Josh Williams was a master at reading missed shots and slid through traffic to grab 11 boards to go with six points; Hansmann chipped in with six points, seven rebounds and three blocked shots; Drew Cremisino found himself in foul trouble but still managed to dish out seven assists.

With the 13-point win, the Rangers (15-11) headed to Concordia University on Tuesday, March 13 for a game against No. 1 seed Johnson High School (22-4).

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