Out of 10 No. 1 seeds in the MIAA basketball tournaments this winter – five boys, five girls – nine are still playing.

 

Those nine did not have to play the Lee High girls basketball team.

 

The ninth-seeded Wildcats pulled off arguably the season’s biggest upset on Saturday when they upended No. 1 Hopedale to reach this week’s state semi-final round.

 

On Sunday afternoon, the Lee girls got together to celebrate their Final Four berth in style, cutting down one of the nets in their gymnasium and boarding a flatbed for a parade down Main Street.

 

Senior captain Mia Puleri said that Lee, which trailed by as many as 15 in the fourth quarter on Saturday, was just the kind of team that could overcome that deficit on the road in a hostile environment against a heavy favorite.

 

“I think that our team is very level-headed,” Puleri said. “It’s something that we really pride ourselves on – not getting too excited, in the sense that that can go too fast and you can be almost too emotional sometimes.

 

“So we try to stay very even keeled, which means not getting too down or getting too high before the game is over. I think in the second half yesterday, when the pressure was building on Hopedale, we were still very even, because we had nothing to lose. We were the nine seed. They were the one seed.”