Point-guard Der­rick Box­ill played like a true cham­pi­on when he scored 16 of his match-high 29 points in the fourth quar­ter, which ul­ti­mate­ly guid­ed La Ro­maine Jet Stars to the Hoop of Life Cham­pi­onship tro­phy with a 81-73 win over Mal­oney in the third and de­cid­ing fi­nals clash, at the Mal­oney Bas­ket­ball Court on Sun­day night.

Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Gary Grif­fith was on hand to present the win­ner's cheque for $1.5 mil­lion-dol­lars, while Dr Wendy Quam­i­na-Yorke, the deputy per­ma­nent sec­re­tary in the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty hand­ed over the cham­pi­onship tro­phy to Adri­an Joseph. This was in front of a siz­able away sup­port which made the jour­ney from South Trinidad to wit­ness the du­el.

It was the fi­nal match of the sea­son and it lived-up to all the billings as sup­port­ers of the sport and the two com­mu­ni­ties in­volved con­verged all over the venue seek­ing out any van­tage point that they can get.

Mal­oney won the first match, 86-77, be­fore La Ro­maine lev­eled the three-match se­ries 76-66.

The home-team, Mal­oney went on an 8-1 run from the jump ball, which it then built to a 22-19 first quar­ter ad­van­tage. How­ev­er, when the first half end­ed, Mal­oney on­ly car­ried a nar­row 40-38 lead in­to the dress­ing room.

In the third quar­ter, as Mal­oney was al­lowed to score freely, cen­tre Shawn "Shawny" Lawrence scored six points, while point-guard Kevon Nor­eiga added five. That gave the team an 11-point lead (62-51) to close the ses­sion, but what was to fol­low can on­ly be de­scribed as awe­some.

De­von Camp­bell opened the fourth quar­ter with a lay-up off a pass from Der­rick Box­ill, and from then on it was the Box­ill show.

La Ro­maine went on a 15-1 run which gave it a 64-63 lead. Box­ill, who scored 21 points in the fourth quar­ter in a come-from-be­hind ef­fort in the se­ries ty­ing fix­ture in La Ro­maine, on Wednes­day, did the same again to Mal­oney. Mal­oney failed to con­tain the point-guard, which brought an ar­gu­ment that Box­ill may not just be the best point-guard in the coun­try, but per­haps the best play to date.

Box­ill, who scored 40 points in match two, of which 21 came in the fourth quar­ter, got sup­port from Joseph, who came up big with 21 points, 12 of which came in the first half. Lester Ed­wards added 13 points and Kevin Kyle Sargeant 10.

For Mal­oney, which earned $500,000 and was pre­sent­ed with a repli­ca cheque by the Min­is­ter of State in the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Ebau Mo­heni, cen­tres Kievan Bac­quain and Lawrence were the on­ly play­ers in dou­ble-dig­its with points 13 each.

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