At a stroke the Baldwin boys’ basketball team passed its first real Conference AA-2 test and avenged all of last season’s losses. But the Bruins weren’t keen to take a victory lap.
In a matchup many observers felt was fraught with implications, Baldwin downed visiting league rival Port Washington 57-45 on Jan. 4, representing a triumph of the league’s top offense over its No. 1 defense. The Vikings had been kryptonite to Baldwin’s supercharged lineup last winter, dishing out two defeats to blemish the repeating AA-2 champion Bruins’ 18-2 campaign, which ended with a 45-39 loss to the Vikings in the county semifinals.
Baldwin head coach Darius Burton – whose team moved to 3-0 in league, 6-1 overall, with a 76-44 league road win against East Meadow on Jan. 9 – dismissed any notions of payback as a motivating factor, stating the Bruins instead believe in having a short memory.
“Fans wanted to use the rivalry [with Port Washington] as fuel, but we just saw it as another game,” Burton said. “Last year was last year. We just wanted to handle business in our first league game at home.”
Despite losing two All-County players to graduation, Baldwin rolled 31-0 this past summer, collecting three summer league titles. The juggernaut screeched to a halt in the Bruins’ regular-season opener, a hard-fought 64-58 loss to Newburgh Free Academy Dec. 7. Directly after the early stumble Baldwin began its current win streak, beating its past six opponents by an average margin of 14 points.