With just 10 seconds left in the game Parkway Christian had the chance to complete an 18-point comeback to Keith.

The Bears (20-10), weren’t about to let that happen and kept the Wildcats from getting even a shot off and securing a 48-46 win and a trip to Birmingham.

“It was real tough man,” tournament MVP Forrest Pasley. “All that pressure and they are playing real hard. It’s tough. I had counted it as a win in the third quarter, but not the fourth. We made some turnovers and they went down and made some threes.”

The trip to the Final Four marks the first for Keith High School since 1998.

Many of the players said it’s a relief because their friends and relatives had continued to talk to them about it.

“I had friends and family that won’t talk anymore,” Christopher Oden said. “They tried to say that we needed to push it back to the next level and that’s where we wanted to be at.”

Keith started the game hot and led the entire way behinds Pasley’s 22-point and 16-rebound performance.

In the fourth quarter, however, the Wildcats began to heat up from the 3-point line, allowing them to press the ball and force turnovers.

“I was actually hoping for the press, to be honest,” coach Tommy Tisdale said. “In the last game with Holy Spirit when they pressed it was to make a basket. I knew with the athletes we had that if we got running up and down the court, then we can really play that style. For some reason, I don’t know if it was the big stage, we turned the ball over at points that we shouldn’t have turned the ball over.”

The turnovers allowed Parkway to pull within just two, but the Bears continued to make baskets to stay just ahead and survived.

“They had to make it back 16 points,” Tisdale said. “If someone would have told me they were going to surge back with 15 and one-half and we were going to go to Birmingham by half a point, then load it up, let’s go to Birmingham by half a point.”

“Right now, I’m proud of these guys.”

The Bears will move on to defending state champions Pickens County, who knocked Keith out of the play-offs last year in the Birmingham-Jefferson County Civic Center on Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m.