LIBERTY BOYS WINS!!!!!!!!!!

Darrun Hilliard and Anthony Gonzalez combined for 36 points, including all but four of their team's 24 second-half total, to lift Liberty to a historic 46-38 win over Hempfield Saturday afternoon at Villanova University in the PIAA Class 4A boys basketball quarterfinals.

With the win, the Hurricanes (25-5) advance to the state's final four where they will play District One champ Penn Wood (26-3), a 66-55 winner over Scranton on Saturday. The Liberty-Penn Wood game will be played Wednesday at a site and time to be announced.

This is the deepest any Liberty team has ever advanced and these Hurricanes have now tied the 2007-08 version for most wins in school history. Liberty took a 6-0 lead at the outset and only trailed once, at 26-24 with 2:08 left in the third quarter.

It was 30-all entering the fourth quarter and Hilliard and Gonzalez took over the offense for Liberty, while Hempfield went 3:31 without scoring a point.

Knotted at 32, Gonzalez scored off a Hilliard pass to give Liberty a lead it would never lose. The District 11 champs went on a 6-0 run to take a 38-32 lead.

The Black Knights (29-2) got back to within 39-36 with 1:06 left on a pair of Mark Enoch free throws, but a three-point play by Jarrod West off a Brandon Holland reopened a six-point lead with 58 seconds to go and Liberty made enough free throws down the stretch to secure another game on Wednesday.

Hilliard finished with 21 points and Gonzalez tallied 15 -- both scoring 10 in the second half.

"It's a surreal feeling," said Liberty coach Chad Landis. "When this is all over, hopefully, I will get to enjoy this more. Right now, you win a game and think about the next one. But I put some keys on the blackboard before the game and one of them was to 'love the atmosphere.' If they didn't love it, we were going to be done.

"But they loved it and won it. I'm trying to love it, too, but I also want to put us in a position to win the next one."

-- Keith Groller