HILLSDALE — Jeff Jasper fought back tears and his voice trembled as he stood in front of his players in Pascack Valley’s locker room and read the words inscribed on the Joe Poli Holiday Tournament championship plaque.

It was the second year in a row that the Indians’ head coach could celebrate winning the tournament with his team, but the importance and meaning of the accomplishment never fades.

Honoring Poli, the former Pascack Valley principal who until he died in 1989 strove to have a positive impact on those around him, is too important for the Indians and Jasper, who was a close friend of Poli’s.

“I think that as much as it means to the team and as much as it means to Jasper and the Poli family, it means so much to our entire community,” Kelly Petro said. “You see how many people come out. Yeah, it’s to come watch basketball. But it’s so much more than that, especially for this tournament.”

Petro finished with 10 points and was outstanding defensively as Pascack Valley defeated IHA, 42-33, in the tournament’s championship game on Saturday.

The Indians (7-0) maintained their unblemished record to give Jasper his 997th career victory.

It was an intense, gritty and physical game, but Pascack Valley hit key shots and played stifling defense to pull out the win.

“First off IHA is IHA, they’re awesome,” Jasper said. “The focus and the intensity with which we played, the attention to detail, all of those things are the reason that we came out ahead. In the pregame, it was really simple. It was, ‘Look, we have to be who we are. We’ve got to be us. We can’t control what they’re going to do. We are us. This is it.'”

That was all the Indians needed.

Brianna Wong finished with eight points, Kelly Smith had seven while Brianna Smith and Cerina Dunkel each added six.

Dunkel gave the Indians a spark off the bench, draining a pair of three-pointers in the first half and taking a charge on defense.

“I feel like our defense, we did what we needed to do,” Kelly Smith said. “We did what we did in practice. We just really came out to play.”

The Indians held IHA to just five points in the fourth quarter, and the final two points the Blue Eagles scored came on a layup at the buzzer.

Eliya Herriott and A’Nyah Barker each had 10 points for IHA.

The toughest matchup for the Indians was in the low post against Blue Eagles 6-foot-3 center Anna Morris. But Petro and the Indians held Morris to two points and neutralized the Blue Eagles’ inside game.

“Our help defense was awesome,” Petro said. “I can’t take all the credit for it because I literally just stood behind her, tried to play straight up and the help defense we had was amazing.”

Pascack Valley also crashed the boards hard all game.

“I thought we rebounded the ball extremely well for an undersized team,” Jasper said. “That was really the key.”

In the end, Pascack Valley played Pascack Valley basketball.

The Indians honored Poli in the process.

“We say we play basketball with our heart and our gut,” Smith said. “So that’s what we had to do today.”

Email: iseman@northjersey.com