If you ask Shaleese Joyner, she’ll tell you she’s not a shooter.

But shooter or not, there she was at the free-throw line at the most important point in the game: a game time with 15.5 seconds left in the game. She did know one thing.

“I don’t shoot at all, but I was just like, ‘if I miss this,’ I will be really upset, and I had to do this for the team,” said Joyner, a Valley Central High School junior.

The gym was still buzzing from Terri’nashjae Burden’s game-tying 3-pointer about 11 seconds earlier.

“All that noise was really getting to me, honestly,” she said.

She missed the first but made the second, and the Vikings’ held on for the final 15 seconds to escape Newburgh Free Academy on Saturday morning with a 44-43 victory after rallying from a 12-point halftime deficit.

“We changed our energy,” Joyner said. “We came together as a team, and we just used all of our heads together.”

Joyner had a big game offensively, as she was the Vikings’ most consistent scorer with a game-high 13 points.

“That second half, they came out like a different team,” Valley Central coach Bill Michella said. “That’s what we needed to do to win. Shaleese Joyner was fantastic off the bench. It was her day tonight. She saved us.”

Kelly Schmidt had a big fourth quarter, scoring six of her 12 points in the fourth, including a pair of free throws that gave the Vikings a 39-38 lead with 2:26 to go in the game. Seconds later, older sister Riley Schmidt hit a layup to widen the lead to three points.

“Kelly’s a gamer,” Michella said. “She’s only a sophomore. Shaleese is a junior, but Kelly is really coming along the last four games. She’s really stepped up her game, and I expect a lot of good things out of her next year.”

Both teams came out slow in the third quarter with no offense until Joyner broke the ice with a layup to cut the Goldbacks’ lead to 10 points. Then, with the Goldbacks leading by 11, Kelly Schmidt knocked down a 3 to pull the Vikings to within eight points at the end of the third quarter.

Michella was concerned about the team’s energy coming into Saturday’s game, as two days earlier they played what he described as a “great came” against Monroe-Woodbury, a 60-53 loss, that they almost pulled out for the victory.

Giselle Johnson led the Vikings in that game, while Riley Schmidt and Kelly Schmidt had 12 points each. Amanda Exarchikas led the Crusaders with 21 points, and Olivia Shippee had 14.

“I was a little worried about that coming into this game and underestimating (Newburgh),” Michella said. “They haven’t won too many games, but they don’t give up, and you saw it was pretty evident today.”

The Vikings struck first but couldn’t get into a rhythm and fell behind 13-9 in the first quarter and were outscored, 17-9, in the second. Burden led the Goldbacks with a game-high 24 points.

The Vikings have two regular season games left. They were scheduled to host the Orange County Interscholastic Athletic Association Division 1 leaders, Warwick on Monday and travel to Middletown on Thursday.

“We’ve grown a lot,” Joyner said. “At the beginning of the season, we were just getting to know one another, and we didn’t have chemistry. Now, our chemistry is really good. I feel like you could put us in with any group, and we’d be fine.”