As the spring sports season wraps up across the region, with the last of the MIAA’s state finals this weekend, another year of competition on fields, in stadiums, in gyms, and on courts comes to a close.
If you’ve guided a child through high school sports then you know the drill. Team equipment gets stored for the summer and school uniforms are washed, folded, and put away.
Unless, of course, the only high school season left on the horizon is the last one — graduation.
If you, like me, are careening ever so quickly toward watching that high school kid of yours take the long, emotional walk to “Pomp and Circumstance,” you also understand the truly mixed emotions of knowing it’s all coming to an end, that your schedule moving forward is no longer tied to the whims of the classroom bell, the sports schedule, or the playoff grid. The sadness can be gripping in expected and unexpected ways, harder in some aspects than the end of your own playing days, signaling a seismic shift in family dynamics and emotions.
Feeling confident that my experience is far from unique, I reached out via e-mail to my Globe colleagues, wondering how others felt about a subject Chad Finn wrote so eloquently about last year.
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The great Bob Hohler put it beautifully: “Some of the greatest joys of my life have been cheering for my daughter [Lauren] as she played field hockey and basketball at Concord [N.H.] High School, then watching her use the tools she gained playing high school sports to make her way as an adult.
“The games may end, but the lessons endure.”
If you know you know, about the particular brand of madness of keeping up with the schedule of a busy, active kid (or kids), what it is to have your family car turned into a taxi service complete with caked-in dirt and ice cream stains, having to learn to navigate highways and byways with the aid of Waze and Google Maps, forced to find the patience to wait out weather delays or wait for the A/C to kick in, and to sit through extra time, overtime, tiebreakers, and shootouts.
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You know you’ll miss it, but you also know that none of it ever really goes away.
Lessons learned through team sports, particularly at the high school level when you’re joining forces with friends and classmates to represent your town and community, last forever. They fuel memories that can erupt at any moment, amazingly vivid whether they happened last week, last month, last year, or decades ago. It’s no wonder that stories of abusive coaches or ugly sideline behavior hit so hard, because those of us lucky enough to have had positive experiences, a number I believe far outweighs the negative, know just how valuable those sporting days were.
Close your eyes, and what do you see?
For me, it’s a big yellow bus, filled by hard-back benches with sticky vinyl seats, three-seaters down one side of the aisle, two-seaters down the other. Wheel wells stealing valuable leg room, windows with impossible-to-budge latches.
The stench alone of those rides was enough to chip away the bright yellow paint on the outside of the bus, an odd, awful mixture of perspiration, dirt, anticipation, and anxiety.
They were the worst.
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Except they were the best.
The songs we sang and cheers we chanted, the goals we scored and heights we scaled, working independently within a system toward a common goal. What’s better than sports?
While many teammates went on to play in college, for most of us, the truth is that the end of high school marks the end of the road of competitive sports. The indelible mark left behind, be it from a championship season or a winless one, a game-clinching goal or a missed free throw, can guide us through life. Dealing with success and failure in equal measure, learning humility in the glow of triumph and perseverance in the face of defeat, who doesn’t need those abilities when entering the workforce, or forming adult relationships?
I was moved recently by the words of Paul Maurice after his Florida Panthers lost the Stanley Cup Final to the Vegas Golden Knights, when the coach spoke directly to the ethos built from our earliest sporting days and how much it meant for him to see it carried through his disappointed but close-knit professional locker room.
“You get cynical when you get old, right? Pro sports can make that happen,” he said.
“The game is wonderful. It’s beautiful, but the best part about sports, for all the things that you want your kids to learn when you put them in sports, for all the great character stories, [they] were all in that room this year from training camp on. We’re casual with our words sometimes, but that group of guys loves each other, every day. The way they treat each other. Completely destroyed any cynicism I might have about pro sports. It was a wonderful thing to be a spectator of and see it every day. At the very least, profession-affirming for me.”
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And when he added one more thought, I felt it all the way back to my high school days in track and soccer. “I love these guys. They gave me a great year of my life.”
A great year, a great four years. Even if they’re ending, the truth is, they’re a part of us forever. If we’re lucky.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.