Winning and losing all at once
Call it a bittersweet Saturday.
Three North Idaho teams won big games on title day at the state girls basketball tournament, but…
None of them were playing for championships.
Well, not the REAL championships, the trophies they trekked to the Boise area to capture and haul home.
Lake City in 5A and Genesis Prep in 1A Division II each won their respective consolation brackets, and Timberlake (3A) captured the third-place hardware.
So all our local representatives, except huge underdog Lakeland in 4A, finished the season with victories.
At least the seniors at Lake City, Timberlake and Genesis Prep could wrap up their prep careers with smiles and hugs.
That’s no small thing for high school kids who have bonded with their teammates, coaches, managers and everyone else in their programs over several years.
Those rides home were a lot more fun than if the girls had gone out with losses.
And yet…
ALL THREE of our final-day winners can look back at this tournament and think: “Could we have won a state title?”
Or looking at it another way: “Did we get knocked out of the title picture despite giving it our very best shot?”
The truth is that all of them came unglued early because — for whatever reason — they simply couldn’t shoot the ball.
No, scratch that.
They shot it plenty. Just not accurately.
Lake City’s tourney adventure was a bit different than the others.
The T-Wolves were the first team I really saw after my switch into our sports crew, and that night they were pretty ragged while holding off Coeur d’Alene 43-37 in a game that easily could have been lost.
I remember thinking that this was not a great shooting team, and that somehow knocking off unbeaten Mountain View at state would be a tall order.
They’d already been whacked pretty good by Mountain View this year.
As it happened, my premonition was correct — but backwards.
Lake City got dismissed 54-44 by Eagle in the first round, converting on just 19 of 52 shots.
We’d all overlooked Eagle a bit, a state runner-up the past two years and stuck in this event as a district runner-up only because of losing fourth-quarter leads twice against mighty Mountain View.
So what happened?
Neither Eagle nor Lake City lost again.
Eagle finally overcame its final-quarter issues and defeated Mountain View to win the whole thing.
Meanwhile, Coach James Anderson has repeatedly called Lake City girls “warriors,” and I think they surely proved that in Nampa.
Anderson’s collection of volleyball and soccer stars gave it a heck of a shot, and the T-Wolves senior class signed off by doing itself proud.
THE ONLY legitimate favorite (or co-favorite) from District 1-2 was Timberlake, expected to face relentlessly good Sugar-Salem in the final.
But just like with Lake City, there was an unexpected problem.
Parma didn’t exactly roll over in the 3A semifinals, and Coach Matt Miller said he couldn’t even recognize his Timberlake girls.
“It just wasn’t us,” he said.
The funny thing about Timberlake’s loss is that lack of state tournament experience wasn’t exactly the problem, as soph guard Taryn Soumas canned seven 3-pointers in the loss.
Who knows if Miller would have “recognized” his stars in a title game?
Sugar-Salem buried Parma for its third state title in five years, so maybe Timberlake would have struggled against the senior-laden champions.
Still, oh, for a shot at it.
That’s the nature of state, though.
One tough night, and…
Suddenly, you’re playing games that would have seemed “ugh” on the trip to Boise.
Think of this: It takes focus, guts and real caring for your teammates to come back and play well after a disheartening defeat at this tournament.
Lake City, Timberlake and Genesis Prep each reached down and pulled it off.
Well done, ladies.
Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.
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