Bangor boys see 81-game conference winning streak snapped in loss to Royall

For six years, the Bangor Cardinals have ruled over Scenic Bluffs boys’ basketball with an iron grip.

Since suffering a 64-61 loss to eventual Scenic Bluffs champion Hillsboro on February 18, 2016, Bangor had been untouchable in conference play. The Cardinals would win their last two league games of the 2015-16 season and never looked back, collecting 81 consecutive wins in Scenic Bluffs play — a run that became the longest active conference winning streak in all of Wisconsin high school boys’ basketball.

If you include postseason games, Bangor had won 88 straight against its Scenic Bluffs counterparts.

That all came to an end late last week against an opponent that has consistently been one of the Cardinals’ toughest matchups in conference play over the past several years: the Royall Panthers.

Back on January 14 of this year, Bangor narrowly made it out of Elroy with a 51-45 road win over the Panthers. In that game, Royall led by as much as 12 late in the first half and made a run in the game’s final minutes after the Cardinals asserted control in the second half.

In their second matchup of this season, the Panthers would not let the opportunity slip through their grasp.

Late free throws from Royall sophomore guard Savon Wainwright helped guide the Panthers (14-9 overall, 7-6 Scenic Bluffs) to a dramatic 47-45 victory over the Cardinals (17-4, 11-1) to snap that historic winning streak Thursday, February 17 in Bangor.

Royall led by as much as eight midway through the first half before the Cardinals went on a little run and the score wound up being knotted at 26-26 come halftime.

The grinding, defensive affair continued after the break, which turned into a tight, back-and-forth battle where neither team led by more than four in the second half.

The score sat deadlocked at 43-43 when Wainwright was fouled and sent to the line for a 1-and-1 opportunity with 32.1 seconds remaining. Wainwright successfully converted a pair of free throws to give his team the 45-43 advantage.

On the ensuing Bangor possession, junior guard Tanner Jones lost control of the ball and it was eventually fallen on by Wainwright, who the refs ruled was fouled in the scrum. The Royall sophomore coolly drained two more free throws to extend the lead to 47-43 with 19.7 seconds left.

Jones made a pair of free throws of his own down on the other end, Wainwright proceeded to miss the front end of another 1-and-1 chance and Bangor senior guard Gunner Ellenburg corralled the rebound. After a timeout with seven seconds to go, the Cardinals brought the ball up and got a solid look at a potential game-winning 3-pointer courtesy of junior forward/guard Dustin McDonald.

However, McDonald’s shot hit back iron and bounced away as the final buzzer sounded, completing Royall’s upset win on the road.

“I’ll give Bangor a lot of credit in the fact that they had the 81-game winning streak (snapped), and the first thing they did was line up and shake our hands and say congratulations,” said Royall head coach Scott Uppena. “That’s class. Not a lot of 17-and-18-year-old kids will take what happened last night and do it with class. Coach Pederson and his kids did a great job with that, and I certainly commend them for that.”

Wainwright led the way for the Panthers with a game-high 15 points and 5 rebounds, sophomore guard Jacob Ceizyk finished with 9 points and junior forward Gabe Keenan chipped in 8 points in the victory.

Meanwhile, for Bangor, senior guard Will Reader set the pace with 14 points and 8 rebounds, Ellenburg added 10 points and 8 rebounds, Jones had 9 points and 6 rebounds and McDonald tacked on 7 points.

With their two-point win and six-point loss this season, Royall has unquestionably been the Cardinals’ thorniest challenge in the Scenic Bluffs. No other conference opponent has done better than a 17-point loss to Bangor on the year. But this isn’t the first time the Panthers have proven to be a tougher test than most.

During their 81-game Scenic Bluffs winning streak, the Cardinals finished the season with a perfect conference record on five separate occasions. Royall had the slimmest margin of defeat of any league foe in three of those years.

On January 9, 2018, against a Bangor team that would go 27-1 and win a Division 5 state title, the Panthers led 30-28 at halftime before eventually falling 66-56 in a game played in Elroy.

Almost exactly a year later in the same location on January 8, 2019, Royall led by one with just over a minute to go before the Cardinals escaped with a 52-49 victory. No other conference opponent did better than a 9-point loss to that 25-2 state semifinalist Bangor squad.

Last season in Bangor on January 21, 2021, the Cardinals — who finished the campaign 19-3 — fended off the Panthers for a 59-51 win. It was their only single-digit margin of victory in Scenic Bluffs play for the year.

Royall’s methodical play style that puts an emphasis on slowing the game into a half-court contest has proven to be more effective than most against Bangor, who likes to get out in transition and turn defense into offense when it can.

Since even the best of winning streaks all must come to an end eventually, perhaps it was only fitting that it was the Panthers who finally got over the hump and took down the Cardinals.

“They do a very good job of getting us to play the style they want to play,” said Bangor head coach Jacob Pederson. “We struggle sometimes to be able to get ourselves out of that funk and understand that we need to slow ourselves down and concentrate on a few smaller things.”

The opportunity to truly reflect on this incredible, six-year conference winning streak will come later on in the offseason, but Pederson still took the chance to express gratitude to all the players past and present that made such a run possible.

“I’m just really proud of all the kids we’ve had here in the last six, seven years I’ve been part of the program,” Pederson said. “Just their willingness to always be hungry and want more and do their best every time out there.”