After eight seasons of photographing the Camden High basketball team, I believe the 2021-22 squad — with a 31-3 record — was probably the best Panther team I’d seen.

As rough as things could get in this oft-maligned city, the court was a place where Camden teens could showcase their excellence — frequently against more affluent, suburban peers.

The talent and tenacity of the kids — and the love and hope the community invested in them — made Panther basketball a winter tradition for me.

A former Inquirer staffer, I left this newspaper in 2014 after winning a journalism fellowship to document life in a city I felt was poorly covered and misunderstood. I made Camden my beat, and spent much of that first year embedded at Camden High, to show how poverty affected learning and how the school was surviving the influx of charter schools in the city, which were luring students away from Camden High.

I hadn’t intended to photograph sports until I brought my cameras to a few football and basketball games to make portraits of spectators and athletes, and the players started asking me if I’d gotten an action shot of a stellar touchdown run or a winning basket. I couldn’t say no.

At the basketball games, the bleachers shook with the sounds of the Camden High Mighty Marching Panthers band and the foot-stomping of a top-drawer cheerleading squad. “You want the High? You got the High!” was the fans’ battle cry, and a hard-won victory over a tough opponent was greeted with a joy exceeded only at the city’s high school graduations.

From my time at the school, I knew the adversity many players faced. There was Rasool Hinson, whose mother was killed by a stray bullet during a family car ride; Dustin Singleton, numb from losing so many friends to gun violence; and TaQuan Woodley, who had a stint in foster care and committed multiple crimes as a juvenile before using the sport to help overcome his past.

It was impossible not to root for them, or to cry with them when they lost state championships.

But tears were almost nonexistent this year, and this Panther team was no longer all kids that had grown up in Camden. DJ Wagner, the top-ranked junior in the country — whose father (DaJuan) and grandfather (Milt) were Camden High basketball legends — became a magnet for talented teens from other schools.

Players like Aaron Bradshaw and Elijah Perkins left prestigious institutions like Roselle Catholic in North Jersey and the Ranney School in Central Jersey to attend public school in Camden and play with Wagner. The team drew crowds, with nationally televised games and admirers waiting in line for Wagner’s autograph.

The COVID-19 pandemic eliminated postseason play for two years, but in March, the Panthers beat Newark Central at Rutgers to win their first state title in 22 years. They cried only when they lost the final Tournament of Champions game a few days later, ironically falling to Bradshaw’s alma mater, Roselle Catholic.

Along the way, the native and out-of-town players experienced the same pleasures and pain of the city. It was Panther Cian Medley’s idea to hold a free summer basketball camp for kids, where the children — like the players, some from Camden, some not — were thrilled to be rubbing elbows with the athletes. At a Camden party attended by several of the players, a team member was reportedly grazed by a stray bullet.

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The Panthers’ success this season prompted the digital media outlet NJ.com to launch a six-month inquiry into the legality of Camden’s recruitment of players from other New Jersey towns, with the resulting article titled: “Camden celebrates a hoops rebirth. But critics wonder: Did they cheat their way to a championship?”

The case is now being investigated by the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association.

The article’s depiction of Camden as a sad cluster of abandoned buildings and mention of a sky-high murder rate from 10 years ago made it easier for Black and brown Camdenites to dismiss the accusation as sour grapes from white folks who were jealous of the team’s triumphs.

I wondered whether I should question the state championship title I’d watched the Panthers chase for the last eight years and finally win.

I remembered how unfair it seemed when Camden High students who couldn’t afford winter coats or breakfast and had to walk past drug corners to get to school were measured by the same test scores as their suburban peers — and how I’d felt about them having to live the same distance from their schools in order to be given busing as suburban peers who faced little danger walking to school.

I recalled how many city leaders had been strongly rumored to not live in Camden as required by law, and all the aspects of the city — from its powerful political machine to its environmental racism — that were far riper for a lengthy investigation than this team.

I searched for a good reason that DJ Wagner should not be allowed to bring basketball glory to the school where his father and grandfather thrilled some of these same exact fans.

Was Camden High guilty of flouting the rules by recruiting in the same manner as private and religious schools?

Of wanting a title so badly that it risked sanctions by bringing players here from other communities to pay a small amount of tuition when the rules precluded it?

If the answer is yes, I decided that in a world of contradictions and unfairness — and a city so often struggling under the weight of both — it would be one sin I could forgive.

April Saul is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who left her staff job at The Inquirer to cover the challenges and joys of Camden residents on her Facebook page, CAMDEN, NJ: A Spirit Invincible.