UNIVERSITY PARK - Bishop Guilfoyle's greatest shortcoming was revealed in the PIAA Class A girls basketball championship game.

The Lady Marauders have no sense of the dramatic.

With Saturday afternoon's 49-27 victory over Nativity BVM at the Bryce Jordan Center, Guilfoyle completed one of the most dominating wire-to-wire runs area basketball has experienced this decade. Bishop Carroll's Sarah Bradley-led state title efforts in 2002 and 2003 are the only others that come to mind, and BG lost fewer games than either of those terrific Lady Husky squads.

The Lady Marauders entered the season considered one of the elite Class A teams in the state. Four months full of routs later, they removed any doubt that they were the best.

Just how dominant were they? Put it this way: If the Mirror's Buck Frank were to reprise his award-winning "Big Shots' feature, the only way this Guilfoyle team would get a sniff of it would be if he included first-half baskets.

To put it into perspective, of the Lady Marauders' 30 wins - tying the 1992-93 squad for second-most in program history behind just the 2007 state championship team - only the 47-41 District 6 second-round win over Ferndale was by single digits and only six others were by fewer than 15 points.

Guilfoyle held double-figure leads entering the fourth quarter 27 times, including five games against district champions.

"We never let it go to our heads. We never got cocky, and we always tried to stay focused,' Lady Marauder junior Alli Williams said. "We never overlooked a team. We just tried to come out and play our game.'

Most of the time, BG ended up playing against itself and its pursuit of perfection rather than its opponent. Could the Lady Marauders go an entire game with fewer than five turnovers or make more than 60 percent of their field goal attempts? Could they hold the other team to 25 points?

"When it comes down to the third and fourth quarter, when we're up so much, we run a play called 'Motion 30.' It's to run 30 seconds off the clock and get a good shot,' senior forward Rachel Rea said. "The goal is just to have good passes, good off-the-ball movement and just keeping the ball in your hands.'

By the end of the year, BG had run 'Motion 30' so much that its execution became impeccable.

The only blemish on Guilfoyle's record turned out to be a setback to Bishop McCort in the Laurel Highlands Conference championship game in which the Lady Marauders, after a fast start, inexplicably ran out of gas or forgot how to play offense for the last three quarters. Even that, though, might have had an upside, coming just before the playoffs started for a team that had at that point gone unchallenged.

"I think we needed that at that point. Losing was like a shock, and it just woke me up,' Rea said. "I was like, 'I never want to do that again,' so we went into every game full force.'

Somewhat sadly, no one ever emerged as the Cowboys to BG's late-70s Steelers or the Larry Bird Celtics to Guilfoyle's Magic Johnson Lakers, someone that could really challenge the Lady Marauders. No one ever seemed to have a realistic chance to beating them, or at least taking them down to the wire and make them elevate their game to yet another level in some classic contest. Even the Carroll teams earlier this decade had to go double overtime to beat Charel Allen and Monessen and needed to find ways to overcome Clairton's Kamela Gissendanner.

McCort did split with Guilfoyle, but neither game was very compelling at the end, and the Lady Crushers were a Double-A team. Among Class A teams, Northern Cambria lacked the height and was a little too stagnant at times on offense. Pittsburgh North Catholic and Nativity both relied too heavily on inexperienced players.

Of course, that wasn't in the Lady Marauders' hands. They were clearly a cut above the competition this year, and it showed.

Always.

"It feels really good, because, for the seniors and Alli, this is our second championship team,' senior guard Tiffany Seasoltz said. "I guess we think it's something that happens often, because it has. But it doesn't. It's actually a really big deal.'