Shew: Bring your high tops

Alright, let’s get it on.

For the past four months, it’s been all about Alex Shew and the Porterville Panthers girls’ basketball team.

Alex Shew this, Kyla Hill that, Noel Garcia all up in your face.

Frankly, I got tired of this and that and... get that out of my face, already!

The Panthers whipped up so much media coverage around town this winter (I fully realize that is entirely the fault of mine and my cohort, Sam Robinson), there was no avoiding it wherever you turned.

I think I even saw a box of Wheaties with Shew’s mug on it at the local Save Mart.

But this team earned its right to become the superstars of town.

I mean, Porterville DID win 28 games this year and carried the Panther Show on the road to Irvine where they fell to a Woodbridge squad as tall as, well... the woods. (I’m sorry, that was awful. Let’s just say they were really, really tall.)

And Shew DID run away as the EYL’s Most Valuable Player for a reason. She threw up 18 points per game and willed her team to victory on multiple occasions.

But how does that saying go? Seeing is believing? Yeah, I don’t buy that mumbo jumbo.

I saw Shew in action several times and yet I still ask, “What’s the big fuss?”

That’s right, No. 40: I’m calling you out. Until you drive by me and knock down a jumper — in MY face — I’m not buyin’ the hype, hot shot.

Pick a Saturday. Bill Sharman’s gym. High noon.

Why don’t you bring your little buddy Cori Ann Snyder with you, too?

Look for me and Sam in the knee-high socks, mid-thigh shorts and headbands. Not that we need to resort to fear-inducing tactics with street gear, but if you were true ballers, you wouldn’t be intimidated.

We’ll start off easy, a couple of hook shots and under-handed free throws to show you just what we’re capable of. Don’t be surprised when I soon start raining 3s a la Larry Bird and Sam does the dirty work of Kurt Rambis. (Side note: Google Rambis and TRY not to laugh.)

And just to show you what it’s like to be one of the many opponents you burned, Alex, I’m gonna put on a clinic: My patented shimmy at the top of the key, followed by a semi-crossover (which is where I begin the motions of a Jerry West crossover but instead I totally psych you out and don’t really do one at all).

And by the time you try to follow my eyes behind my orange-tinted goggles, you’ll barely catch my backside as I complete the sickest up-and-under layup you’ve ever seen!

I hate to take advantage of my position in the paper to subject you to peer pressure, so we will keep this little court session behind closed doors. No one needs to endure more than the colossal embarrassment that’s about to come.

Yes, I realize that you and Snyder are in high school and we’re grown men already out of college. Skeptics might wonder, “What could these sports buffoons possibly prove by beating a couple of 18-year-old girls?”

Well, I’ll tell you what it proves. All my life, I never got to play basketball (or any sport, for that matter) at any school level. Perhaps that is what drove me to be a sports writer — the idea that somehow I can succeed vicariously through today’s athletes.

In the critically acclaimed classic, “Napoleon Dynomite,” Uncle Rico is driven to buy a time machine so he could go back in time and get another chance to be the star quarterback at his old high school.

Folks, this is my second chance to “go back in time” and beat someone. Not just someone — a real somebody. Alex Shew. The top female athlete in the whole town.

By the way, Alex... Back in the ’80s, they used to call me the Scorpion. ‘Cause baby, it stings losing to me.