And not to be overshadowed by all the hooping, Aiden Barker stopped by the Reggie Lewis Center for the MSTCA Division 1 state relays, where the St. John’s Prep won the boys crown and the Newton North girls ran away with the girls title.

And before we dive into tonight’s takeaways, visit our Wednesday roundups: Boys’ basketball | Girls’ basketball | Boys’ hockey | Girls’ hockey | Scoreboard

Burlington senior captain Savannah Scali gets her 1,000th on a driving layup. She’s the second player in program history to reach the mark, and was on the court as a sophomore when Aylvia Pena reached the mark in 2023.

Scali entered the game needing 4 points to reach the milestone and did so on a breakaway layup in the first half. After finishing with 17 in a 37-36 win over Wilmington, she is now 2 points behind Pena’s program record of 1,015.

With a 75-29 victory over Ashland, Dover-Sherborn coach Rick Grady won his 200th game. Grady, who led the Raiders to the 2019 Division 3 state championship, took over before the 2007-08 season as the program’s third coach after spending two seasons as an assistant under Chris DuBose, who was there for nearly 30 years.

“Our parents were very nice to recognize the 200th win, but it’s really the work of some great assistant coaches and players over the years,” Grady said.

The most interesting stat line of the night came from Seekonk junior Sienna Miranda, who recorded an unusual triple-double of 11 points, 15 rebounds, and 10 steals, adding 6 assists in a 37-21 win over Case.

The top scorer of the night was Norton senior Ethan Rodriguez, who exploded for 39 points and the Lancers needed every single one of them in a 66-65 road win over Blue Hills. Also hitting the 30-point mark were Norwood’s Alex Yukhymchak (31 in a 78-72 loss to Medfield), Franklin’s Caden Sullivan (30 in a 66-56 win over Milford), and St. Mary’s freshman Jake Fortier, who notched 30 points to help the Spartans (11-0) stay undefeated with a 72-56 win over Cathedral.

Peabody’s Ally Bettencourt controlled the boards with 15 rebounds (and 17 points) in a 66-22 win over Beverly, Apponeque’st CeCe Levrault nabbed nine steals in a 52-27 win over Somerset Berkley, and Foxborough’s Kailey Sullivan notched seven steals in a 64-36 win over Mansfield. Bishop Feehan’s Maddy Stell got hot from deep, hitting seven 3-pointers to finish with 25 points in a 75-63 win over Archbishop Williams.

Shifting to the ice, King Philip goalie Kiki Lynch made a remarkable 44 saves as the No. 19 Warriors beat Medfield, 2-1. Not far behind was Attleboro sophomore Jake Westwater, who made 37 saves to shut out North Attleborough, 1-0, marking the Bombardiers’ first win over their northern rival since 2010. Bedford’s Jake McGrath had a hat trick in a 9-1 win over Lowell and Somerset Berkly’s Nate Manosh turned away 25 shots to record his first career shutout in a 3-0 win over ORR/Fairhaven.

On Thursday, Greta Hammer became the first Gatorade Massachusetts Girls’ Cross-Country Player of the Year to be chosen from Needham.

The junior won the Division 1A meet in 18:13.91, finishing 43 seconds ahead of her closest competitor. She went on to win the Meet of Champions by 14 seconds while setting the course record, take second at the Nike Cross Northeast Regional, and finish 25th at the Nike Cross nationals. She set a personal-best time of 17:31.97 while winning the Bay State Conference championship.

“There’s no question in my mind that Greta Hammer was the most impressive athlete in the state this season,” said Newton North coach Joanna Mantel. “Speaking as a program that sees her multiple times throughout the season, she continually impressed me with her clear dominance on both fast, rolling courses as well as the toughest course in the state at Northfield Mountain.”

Hammer maintains a 3.94 GPA, volunteers as a member of School the World, and serves as a member of Needham’s Environmental and German clubs.

In case you missed any of them, here’s what we’ve written recently:

Brendan Kurie can be reached at brendan.kurie@globe.com. Follow him on X @BrendanKurie.

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Primary care, the foundation of the state’s health care industry, is crumbling, and Massachusetts is running out of time to fix it, according to a report published Thursday by the state’s Health Policy Commission, which sounded the alarm on many ways the front door to the health care industry is broken.

Among the problems: high and growing rates of residents reporting difficulty accessing primary care; an aging and increasingly dissatisfied physician workforce; and an anemic pipeline of new clinicians.

“I worry when I look at some of this data that the state of primary care has crossed a line from which recovery will be very difficult, unless we take action soon,” the commission’s executive director, David Seltz, said in an interview.

The report sets the stage for the work of a new state-appointed primary care task force, created by a health care law signed earlier this month. The law outlines that the new 25-member group will consider issuing recommendations related to increasing recruitment and retention of the primary care workforce and establishing a target for how much insurers should spend on primary care.

Such goals would put Massachusetts more in line with other states, including California, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington, which have set benchmarks for primary care spending. Seltz called such efforts an important way to rebalance the incentives of the market.

“This is an opportunity to shift the dialogue, to one of: ‘What can we do immediately to relieve this deep challenge?’” Seltz said.

While the findings set the stage for reform, they are perhaps not a surprise. Previous reports on primary care have been blaring the warning signal for years. Increasingly high portions of residents have said they had difficulty accessing health care. Analysis on health care spending has shown dwindling amounts of health care dollars going to primary care.

But the report lays out in stark terms just how dire the prognosis on primary care is.

Among the findings:

• Patients’ ability to access primary care is bad and getting worse. New patients must wait an average of 40 days in Boston, twice as long as the average of 15 other cities studied. Access to primary care worsened across the state in recent years, with such issues especially pronounced in lower-income communities.
• A lack of primary care access means more reliance on emergency departments, which are more costly places to get care. In 2023, a whopping two-thirds of those who sought care in hospitals’ emergency departments said they were there because they couldn’t get an appointment in a doctor’s office or clinic.
• Massachusetts has a lot of doctors — the highest total physicians per capita in the country. However the vast majority of those physicians are specialists. Compared to other states, Massachusetts has the fifth lowest share of primary care physicians.
• The primary care workforce is aging, with an estimated half of primary care physicians over the age of 55.
• The pipeline for new primary care doctors is dwindling, with only one in seven new Massachusetts physicians in 2021 going into primary care — among the lowest share in the country.

A primary driver of the current challenge is related to the low reimbursement rates primary care receives relative to other specialties and hospital services, the report states, a factor that disincentivizes both new graduates from entering the field and the health care industry from investing in it.

Beyond the low pay, primary care can be an exhausting job, requiring myriad billing and administrative tasks, increased documentation requirements, and visits too short to accommodate the core point of primary care — caring for the patient.

Dr. Alecia McGregor, a commissioner and an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted the state is seeing evidence of that very burnout and corporatization of medicine, with both those complaints cited as key reasons primary care doctors at Mass General Brigham recently filed to unionize.

The state is currently making up for primary care physician shortages by leaning more on nurse practitioners and physician assistants, together known as “advanced practice providers.” However the share of even those providers working in primary care is dropping, in part because of the low pay.

“Relying on advanced practice providers to serve as (primary care providers) instead of physicians may not resolve challenges related to the availability of providers if we can’t improve job sustainability in the field of primary care,” said Sasha Albert, associate director of research and cost trends at the Health Policy Commission, during a presentation at Thursday’s commission meeting.

Beyond setting the stage for a new task force, Commissioner Tim Foley said the “scary” report emphasized the importance of the commission remaining focused on drivers of the recruitment and retention challenges.

“It just highlights again our need to continue to focus on the workforce issues,” said Foley, who is also the head of union 1199SEIU, which represents health care workers. “We had the hearing on the impact of the workforce, and it hasn’t gotten any better. It’s probably gotten worse.”

Jessica Bartlett can be reached at jessica.bartlett@globe.com. Follow her @ByJessBartlett.