By Vanessa Gezari; Tribune staff reporter
                  

                   March 19, 2001 1:10 PM CST

                   Trailed by 20 honking cars, a school
                   bus rolled down Schaumburg Road on
                   Sunday carrying a tangle of teenagers
                   who had just won the game of their
                   lives.

                   Less than 24 hours after they beat
                   top-ranked Thornwood to win the Class
                   AA state basketball championship in
                   Peoria Saturday night, the Schaumburg
                   High School Saxons were hailed like
                   conquering heroes and embraced like
                   lost boys. Hundreds gathered in the
                   high school gymnasium to welcome
                   the returning champions with speeches
                   and cheers.

                   "They were a bunch of scrappy kids
                   that played well together and shocked all the experts," said Keith
                   Foecking, 46, whose son, Tim, is on the team. "It's kind of a
                   Cinderella story--a once in a lifetime thing."

                   The victory--the first state basketball title for a Mid-Suburban League
                   team since the league was formed in 1963--was an unexpected upset
                   in a contest that pitted South Holland's Thornwood and its nearly
                   unbeatable star, Eddy Curry, against a squad of hardworking team
                   players who seemed almost as proud of their strong friendships as of
                   their victory.

                   "It feels so good because of how hard we worked and how close a
                   group of guys we are," said Mark Pancratz, 18, Schaumburg's most
                   celebrated player.

                   "I felt like we accomplished something that wasn't expected by
                   anyone but us. We did the unthinkable in everyone's eyes. They had
                   Eddy Curry, who's a dominant player, and we're just a bunch of
                   suburban guys."

                   Sunday's welcome began in a parking lot near the intersection of
                   Schaumburg and Martingale Roads, where dozens of parents
                   scrawled messages on their cars with crayons: Saxons Rule. State
                   Champs.

                   The parents had not seen the players since Saturday night. After the
                   game, the boys went out together for a celebratory steak dinner, then
                   stayed up for hours in their hotel talking about this amazing thing
                   they had done and how no one could have predicted it and how they
                   had all hoped and dreamed of it and wait--had they really done it?
                   They found it hard to sleep.

                   "You kept not only reminiscing about all the work, but about all the
                   bad moments when you felt like giving up," Pancratz said, gripping
                   the team's towering brown and gold trophy, which was wrapped in the
                   basketball net that had been cut down after Saturday's game. "It
                   symbolizes all the hard work, our coaches, the guys ... everything,
                   just everything."

                   In the high school gymnasium, the players and their coaches sat in a
                   semicircle. The boys, looking tired and overjoyed, thanked their
                   parents and teachers, the woman who baked them cookies before
                   every game, their coaches and, most of all, their teammates.

                   "I love all these guys," one of them said.

                   The Saxons' coach, Bob Williams, said he had tried to teach the
                   players something about life this season, about togetherness and
                   success and what he calls synergy. Schaumburg won because the
                   boys were better together than any one of them would have been
                   alone, he said.

                   But the players also had their own reasons for wanting to win. For
                   example, after 17-year-old Kevin Pearson's grandfather died in
                   October, Kevin wrote the man's name on his shoes and dedicated
                   the season to him. On Saturday, with seconds left in the game,
                   Kevin made the last basket of the night. He said it was for his
                   grandfather.

                   "He's been with me the whole time," Kevin said. "I cried when I
                   hugged my dad [after the game]. I made my last basket of my high
                   school career at the state championship game. I couldn't ask for
                   anything better than this."

                   Copyright 2001 The Chicago Tribune