Tweet   After taking her daughter to school, Melissa McCafferty noticed something unusual on her drive home Friday.  Heavy machinery and police cars were gathered around the front sidewalk of a house about a block away from hers. In the back of a dump truck, she saw a pile of basketball hoops. Nearby, she spotted a front-end loader working to rip another pole and rim out of the ground. She knew they would come for hers next. The mother of three sped around the corner to her home on Hilldale Court, parked under her children’s basketball rim, climbed to the top of the pole and waited. "I promised my kids I'm not going to let them take it away," said McCafferty, 39, of Claymont. The McCaffertys and at least seven other residents of Radnor Green and Ashbourne Hills received letters warning them this would happen. Police and Delaware Department of Transportation officials say their hoops, angled toward the street, violate the state's Free Zone law, which prohibits hoops, trees, shrubs and other objects from being within seven feet of the pavement's edge in subdivisions. About 15 minutes after McCafferty climbed the pole by standing on top of her minivan, the DelDOT equipment rumbled toward her. Perched on a bend in the metal pole with her fuzzy bedroom slippers dangling down, McCafferty refused to budge despite police and DelDOT pleas. Police threatened to tow her van. They asked if she would miss work over this. She replied she "would be here all day," no matter what. McCafferty heard threats that the hoop would come down whether she cooperated or not. "If you're taking the pole, you're taking me with it," she recalled saying. The McCaffertys won Round 1, as at least five police cars and a few trucks of DelDOT workers left shortly after a News Journal photographer arrived. Hoops violate law On Hilldale Court — a small, quiet street ending in a cul-de-sac -- that blue basketball rim appeared to be the only one to survive the morning commotion....