Reflections on a state final game

The Vikings won the state basketball championship this past Saturday night. Sadly, it was the wrong Vikings as Northland edged out the Princeton Vikings 60-58.

So, some thoughts from the game...in no particular order...

• I was amazed at the small student section and crowd that Northland brought to the game. They're a school located 19 minutes away from the Schottenstein Center according to Google Maps. Their student section didn't look even half full from my vantage point. I don't know if there are school spirit issues or economic issues or what, but for the state finals of the second-biggest sport in Ohio, I certainly would've expected more students there.
• After the game was decided - which means after the game in this case - the Northland student second broke into the chorus of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" as the Princeton fans have been doing pretty much every game this year when they felt the game was out of reach in favor of Princeton. At that point, the many in the PHS student section saluted with raised middle fingers, something that the PHS principals tried very quickly to quell. A few of the PHS students then followed up by raising their wallets in a final salute.
  
  If the Princeton students are going to use the song in their favor, they need to be ready to get such a salute right back. The singing of this song has long bothered me because it suggests an absolute disdain for the opposing team in the game that it undercuts the concept of fair and friendly competition. Yes, Northland shouldn't have sung it - particularly because the game was over by then, so the boasting was pointless - but it was far worse sportsmanship for the PHS fans to lower the bar even further.
  
  And I don't really understand the wallet salute. My only guess here is that those PHS fans assume that the Northland players come from poor socioeconomic background and hence won't have as much money as those PHS fans will. I have no clue what sort of school Northland, and I doubt that many of our students searched GreatSchools.net in advance of the game to find out that indeed, Northland is a 74% black, 99% economically-disadvantaged student body. If they did, knowing that at some point they might need to give the wallet salute (and I have to admit that my understanding of the gesture is pure conjecture), then I've even more disappointed in our students.
  
  The game was a hard-fought one that went against the PHS hopes, but that certainly isn't any excuse to show poor sportsmanship at any point in the game.
• Before the game started, a younger boy behind me booed when a Northland player was introduced. The boy was probably seven or eight years old, and his father asked him rather simply if that was good sportsmanship. The boy hesitated, and the father helped him out by explaining that it wasn't good sportsmanship to boo the opposing players. It was a nice little moment and one that disappeared entirely as the boy, his brother, and father proceeded to spend most of the night berating the officials and yelling at the top of their lungs at how much the referees were making awful calls. I'm thinking that the old saw of the apple not falling far from the tree was very much in effect in the row behind me last night, and it was tough not to turn around and ask the father to remember what he said to his son at the start of the night.
• In a game decided by two points, there will always be dozens of plays that could have - had they gone the opposite way - swung the game's outcome to the other team. I don't typically find myself wrapped up in a game, so I don't normally notice all those little plays, but there were dozens of them that I can come up with from the top of my head for last night's game:
  • the tip-in by PHS of a missed Northland free throw
  • PHS's coach's first technical foul that I had seen all year - for protesting the officiating
  • any of a half dozen charge/foul calls
  • numerous missed three-point shots taken by the PHS players - both those who could normally be counted on to make them and those who probably shouldn't be shooting them
  • calls and non-calls on drives, on steals, on dozens of plays
  • missed free throws
  And I hope that the PHS players don't beat themselves up too badly for each having made those kinds of mistakes. For every play that Princeton didn't make - or ever loose ball that bounced away from them or foul called against them - there was a play that Northland didn't make either. Northland didn't hit every shot, didn't get every call, didn't play a perfect game. And unless a team can say that they definitively played perfectly, there will always be plays in that game that they need to practice, need to get better, should have made a little more cleanly. It's a tough fact, but it's a fact.
• It's rare that I get emotionally involved in any sporting event. I can't affect the outcome by my cheering or my wearing of my lucky shirt or by anything else, but I so desperately wanted the PHS boys to win Friday night's game. It's one thing to lose in the state final game, but for some reasons in my head, it was something entirely different to get to the Columbus and only play one game.
  
  On Saturday, however, I went into the game knowing that PHS was supposed to lose and somehow resigning myself to that outcome before the game even started. Sure, once the team climbed out of the ten-point hole to start the fourth quarter and tied the game with under a minute left, I had hope that my feelings would be wrong, that the right Vikings might just pull this thing out, but I knew somewhere in the back of my head, that they'd gotten far enough to justify all the hype, to make this a successful season.
  
  But, man, I really wanted to see them climb all the way out of that hole.
• I know in my heart of hearts that the officials are doing the best job they possibly can, but there are times when it's tough to keep that thought at the forefront of my feelings. At one point in the third quarter last night, Princeton had five straight fouls called against them in a span of just over a minute. At no point in that time did Princeton get possession of the ball, and every foul seemed to either be minor or to bail out Nortland from a bad position or to be the foul that sent a Princeton player to the bench. I can justify all of the calls and the fact that Northland drew more fouls because they spent most of the game pounding the ball inside where PHS often settled for jump shots, but that doesn't make it any easier in the heat of the moment.
• I think I annoyed Calen, however, with my calmness at some times in the game. At one point, a PHS player reached in, trying to steal the ball from a Northland guard on the left side of the court near midcourt. The Northland player had his back to our seats, and any contact made by the PHS player - either on the ball or on the Northland player - was entirely screened from our view. Immediately, the family behind us announced it as the worst call ever, saying that they obviously saw the contact as being all ball, and I nearly doubled over with laughter, explaining to The Girl (who sat on my side opposite Calen) that there was no way anyone from our view could see the play and that there was no way we could honestly say that we saw the play clearly enough to say whether the call was a good one or a bad.
  
  There are times where my tendency to laugh at things I find absurd doesn't make me any friends. Sorry, Calen.
• I learned this in looking up that earlier point about the wallet salute, but Northland's high school website is awful. Their athletics site and their Instrumental Music Parents Association site are both far better and more professional. That seems odd to me.
• It's kinda cool to see a basketball game in a really big arena - Schottenstein can seat 19,500 for basketball - from time to time. I see almost all of my games in high school gyms, and there's a very different feel in a huge gym. Not enough for me to wish I'd gone to a big university and all, but it's kinda cool from time to time.
• Calen often says that she wishes her team would lose by twenty rather than losing a close one, and I certainly understand that feeling. It's easier as a fan to let the stress go quickly rather than to have to sweat things out. As a player, it's one thing to throw your hands up and say that it just wasn't your day, that the other team was far better, that you had an off day, that whatever, but that's the weak choice. As a fan, I'll say gimme that close game. As a player - in tennis only, admittedly - I'll always take a close loss because that's the one that tells me it was worth coming out. A blowout loss just makes me think I shouldn't have even shown up. Forget that, I don't want to ever get blown out or to see my team get blown out.
• It's easy to say that the calls even out over the long haul, and I believe that they probably do. I also believe that it's pretty much impossible to ever test that theory with any sort of statistical certainty. And I know that even if it does even out over the long haul, that long haul is much, much longer than a single game's duration. Over the course of a season, maybe. Over the course of the game, no way. Not that I really have any clue as to how the refereeing was on Saturday because every call I saw was viewed through the lenses of being a PHS fan. I may not be as vocal as the guy behind me or as hopeful, perhaps, as some others, but I can't even remotely claim that I'm impartial enough to know with any certainty which calls were "good" and which were "bad" rather than which went against PHS and which went for PHS.
• Jordan Sibert is a heck of a player. He ended up with 21 pts - check the stats, and he did it with seeming ease. There's a difference with great players who just seem to make the game look easy rather than the good players who always seem to be the focus of the offense, who seem to need to work for their points night in and night out. Sure, the good players will have nights where they look like great players, but those'll be the nights when you notice them every bit as much. The great players, on the other hand, never quite seem to be the center of everything because they don't need to be; the game just comes a little more easily to them. Their games are the ones where they are consistent all game long, never pressing, never forcing the issue, just consistently getting a few points here and a few points there and ending up with twenty points. Jordan isn't by any stretch of the imagination the greatest player I've ever seen in a high school game, but he's certainly far more than a good player. With the scoring load that he's going to have to carry next year, he just might average twenty-five.
• It's tough to win a game when two of your players are limited to 16 minutes each because of foul trouble - especially when those are the two big guys who have to defend Mr Basketball.
• Darrien Wilkins might be better than I had previously thought. I've been watching him this year and last and thinking that he was a finess player who would shy away from contact at any chance possible. In the final game, however, he was forced to play twenty-two minutes and to defend Mr Basketball during many of them. He showed me something more than I'd seen from him before. Admittedly, he needs to get a little bigger and stronger, but he's got more on the court than I'd thought.
• It sucks to watch a team lose the state final game.
  
  No matter how close they came...no matter how much you can say that they gave it their all...no matter how proud you can be of them for their work and effort and accomplishment...
  
  It sucks to watch them lose.

If you actually want a full recap of the game - since I'm not exactly offering that, feel free to check out some of the cool links that I found for the PHS website on Sunday:

• Hair Club for the Vikings
• Enquirer's HS sports blog
• Princeton pulls away late (semi-final game)
• Princeton focused on Friday (including link to photo album from PHS pep rally)
• Vikes play for 2 coaches
• Victorious Vikings (final game)
• photo album from Columbus Dispatch (final game)
• Final game box score
• Princeton uses second-half surge to beat Toledo St John's in Div I semifinal
• Sullinger's free throws propel Northland to D-I title
• Final game stats and video
• Northland holds off Princeton
• Princeton Falls Short