Eight teams with something to prove take to the floor today as the Kingston Area Secondary Schools Athletic Association senior boys basketball season resumes after a two-week break for exams.

The Kingston Blues, who begin the final third of the regular schedule 4-3, will be trying to get back into the league’s upper echelon when they visit the Regiopolis Notre Dame Panthers at 5 p.m. The Blues  are already done with the league’s top three teams—Frontenac, Sydenham and Bayridge—and a win over Regi, 5-1, would move KC within half a game of the Panthers in the quest for fourth place and home game in the quarter-finals.

Regi, meanwhile, will be trying to position itself for a run at one of the top spots. A win would boost the Panthers to 6-1, with games against the league’s two undefeated teams—Frontenac and Sydenham—still ahead.

In the middle of the pack, a young La Salle team will be trying to establish some momentum going into the playoffs when it hosts Holy Cross, also at 5 o’clock. The Knights, who won two of their first three games—and lost the other by two points to Regi—have struggled ever since and are 2-5 going into the game. After this are games with Queen Elizabeth and Granite Ridge, two teams that have combined for one win in 12 games, so a win today would put La Salle in position to end the season at .500.

Holy Cross, however, will be looking at this as not only a way to stay squarely in the middle of the pack and improve on its 3-3 record, but the Crusaders may see in La Salle an opponent against which it could work to establish consistency that has been lacking in games typified by tremendous runs and terrible dry spells.

At the bottom of the standings, where it appears it will take at least three wins to claim the eighth and final playoff spot, the Napanee Golden Hawks, 2-6, will be trying to get there today when they visit Queen Elizabeth. The Raiders, 1-5 and winners of their last game before the break, will try to show they belong in the post-season mix.

Granite Ridge, the league’s last remaining winless team (0-7), likely sees the visiting Loyalist Lancers, 1-7, as their best chance to shed that label. Loyalist, which into the break having been pounded in consecutive games by Frontenac, Sydenham and Bayridge, will be eager to show that those games forged character, not despair.

Two of the league’s top teams—Sydenham, 7-0, and Bayridge, 6-2—will resume play Thursday, at Regi and QE, respectively. The first-place Frontenac Falcons, 8-0, have another week to gather rust, before the showdown game next Tuesday afternoon at Sydenham.