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The Baker boys basketball team, like many groups of athletes who perform at that rare level where perfect records dwell, at times reminds me of a swarm of bees.

Or perhaps a colony of ants is the better analogy.

What I mean is that these Bulldogs go about their business on the court in a manner both frenzied and precise.

They play with great velocity yet never seem to be hurried, a seemingly contrary condition which all teams strive for but very few can achieve for anything but a brief span of brilliance.

Baker plays that way for most of their 32-minute games.

The comparison with ants or bees occurs to me because these boys, like those insects, work with such palpable purpose and such obvious teamwork.

Like ants carrying food into their hill, or bees arriving at the hive with their loads of pollen, the five Bulldogs on the court seem always to be pursuing the same goal.

They play with a fluidity that strikes me as almost balletic.

But it is at the same time, in another apparent contradiction, quite brutal.

Not physically brutal.

Baker doesn’t dominate its opponents with well-placed elbows to the sternum while battling for a rebound, or subtle shoves to the back, or any of the other thuggish tactics that teams with lesser talent sometimes rely on to gain an advantage.

The Bulldogs beat their foes mentally.

I can think of no better way to describe it than to say that teams, when confronted with Baker’s relentless precision, play dumb.

They make mistakes that, based on their other games, I suspect they largely avoid against lesser opponents.

It is as if players realize they must perform nearly flawlessly even to have a chance to win.

Or at least they think they have to, which comes to the same.

As a result they play with something approaching panic.

This is not conducive to success in sports.

I have watched a particular scenario progress through its stages in most of Baker’s games this season.

Sometimes it starts from the opening tipoff.

In other games it takes a quarter or two.

But eventually the Bulldogs begin to amass points rapidly.

And as the gap on the scoreboard widens, the other team’s players make mistakes, almost as though they are co-conspirators.

They stop dribbling and invite a Baker trap.

They develop a sort of tunnel vision in which there appears to be a clear route for a crosscourt pass, except in reality one Bulldog, and not infrequently two or three, are ready to take the ball out of the air.

And even when an opposing player ends up alone with the ball close to the basket, he misses a shot he usually makes.

It’s as if the player, so shocked to briefly escape the Bulldogs’ harassment, comes down with the basketball equivalent of a hunter’s buck fever.

At the other end of the court, meanwhile, Baker is equally ruthless.

The Bulldogs epitomize the notion that basketball coaches have sought to instill for decades — a crisply passed ball moves far faster than the nimblest defender.

One reason Baker has led Class 4A teams in scoring average the past three seasons is that a goodly percentage of the Bulldogs’ shots are uncontested, or nearly so.

This is neither coincidence nor luck.

It happens because every Bulldog, when he has the ball in his hands, scans the court for an open teammate.

Assists are an important statistic in basketball. Baker has a lot of them.

But I would be interested to see how many of the passes that count as assists were only the last in a series of three or more passes, all made in the span of a few seconds, a sequence that left the defenders hopelessly chasing empty air while the ball slips through the net.

Baker plays with such precision in part because many of the dozen Bulldogs have been teammates since they were in elementary school. They’ve played hundreds of games together.

The group also has a considerable amount of natural ability.

But it’s their longtime coach, Jebron Jones, who has honed that talent as a master sculptor molds a block of clay.

Jones coached many of the Bulldogs before they became Bulldogs. Eight of the 12 varsity players this season were members of a Baker team that won a fifth- and sixth-grade state tournament in March 2018 — Hudson Spike, Paul Hobson, Grant Gambleton, Jaxon Logsdon, Palmer Chandler, Isaiah Jones (Jebron’s son) and brothers Jaron and Eli Long.

They, along with Rasean Jones (Isaiah’s younger brother), Giacomo Rigueiro, Nate Jensen and Brandon McCullough, might well win Baker’s third boys state title, joining the 2007 and 1939 teams.

Whatever happens, though, I’m certain that the Bulldogs will continue to epitomize the concept that all groups of young athletes should aspire to.

They’re a team.