BREWER — In the still-swirling dust following a 10-run loss in the Class A softball state championship game, Lee Johnson offered the words hundreds of coaches have turned to over the years to try and console his team sprawled across Coffin Field’s left field grass.

“I told my kids to keep their heads high and remember the season they had,” Johnson said after Skowhegan was defeated by Scarborough on Saturday. “Don’t let one day affect you.”

Johnson turned to those words because they remain true. As a colleague said to me during the Red Storm’s three-run second inning that sent that program on its way to its fifth win over Skowhegan in a state championship, there’s plenty of winning to go around. Losing is what builds character, what teaches you to deal with failures, what prepares you for life’s many ups and downs ahead.

Immediately, I found it difficult to watch what I thought was a career-defining moment once again elude Skowhegan players — like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown’s eager foot yet again. I’d covered many of these girls since they were wide-eyed freshmen, “happy to be here” and just wanting “to do whatever the team needs me to do.”

Admittedly, that was unfair of me. It’s unfair of anybody to view winning as the only acceptable outcome.

For the third time in their careers, the seniors on the Skowhegan team won the regional championship in June to get the opportunity to play for the state title. Not only was the team undefeated through the end of the Class A North tournament this season, but five of the team’s starters made up the starting five as part of a girls basketball team at the school that was undefeated in the regular season this winter. They resurrected a girls soccer program last fall, giving Skowhegan its first postseason berth in 13 years — this fall doubling its win total from the previous three seasons combined.

Next year, two years, 10 years from now, a class like that is going to be remembered for being among the most enjoyable and competitive there was to watch. Any talk about the abrupt endings to playoff runs will be followed with a cursory, “It’s just a shame they never won it all.”

And it is a shame, but the the reminiscing will move forward to the stuff that’s truly memorable. Sydney Reed’s home run against the best pitcher anybody on that team had ever faced in their high school careers will be lauded. The role players who seemed to have a knack for doing something important at all the right times will be remembered. Memories of the bus trips, the fast-food stops on the way home from a road win over rival Oxford Hills or Messalonskee, the hanging out over dinner and Netflix the nights before playoff games to forge lifelong friendships won’t be erased.

For someone who earns a living reporting scores and outcomes, proclaiming winners and losers, it’s disingenuous to suggest that winning has no benefit. Those who win, who excel, who climb any perceived mountain, rightfully and deservedly celebrate. But it would be equally disingenuous to suggest that I’d ever heard a high school player or coach say, “I got the championship trophy. My life is complete.”

The teams that are fortunate enough to win state championships don’t see the ultimate victory as the finish line.

Scarborough players talked about family. So, too, did members of the Madison softball team, which earlier that same afternoon had won the Class C state title on that very same field. Coaches talked about the process, about the next challenges ahead, about how excited they are for the future development of their players as people.

Bluntly, this was the most pathetic excuse for a spring most any of us can remember. Almost daily, games were postponed, moved to new locations in favor of playable field conditions, or canceled outright. When it wasn’t raining, it was either brutally cold or brutally windy. Or both.

Despite any of that, track and field teams piled into buses together for big meets and long afternoons together. Baseball and softball teams hugged, high-fived, laughed and cried together. Lacrosse teams fist-bumped and chest-thumped, and they did it all in the name of “team.”

When Hall-Dale’s baseball season ended with a shocking, extra-inning loss in the regional quarterfinals — their shot a defending the Bulldogs’ state championship like a test dummy crashing into a cement wall at 55 mph — head coach Bob Sinclair fought back tears as he talked about proud he was of his team and the way they played the game every single day from start to finish.

The Bulldogs didn’t win, but that didn’t render a season meaningless, either. If winning was the only thing, as the tired sports cliche goes, then the beer gut at the end of the bar still talking about what he did “back in high school” or when he coached a team of 10-year-olds to a district championship game none of the boys themselves are going to remember three decades later — that guy would be the life of any party. He’d probably be elected mayor by a landslide. Instead, most of us graciously excuse ourselves to another side of the room when that guy gets on a roll.

Lee Johnson was right.

One day will not dictate an entire high school athletic career, not for anybody on the Skowhegan softball team or on any other field, court or track this spring.

 

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