Yesterday there transpired the taut toutings of Senior Night’s basketball games, the convivial commendation and valediction to our vimful and vital graduating class of our valiant, long-suffering basketball teams, who congruously capped the season in a robust Mack all told; rampaging rustling Raiders, come down from Burney to despoil us, ran roughshod over our ill-shod, stertorous troika: all teams met with defeat thence; the scores per quarter standing as follows: of the JV boys, 8-26, 14-44, 26-61, and 32-77 (both male teams’ respective records are of an eminently intuitive nature, I don’t see much virtue in flashing upon them what would be perceived as a gallsome limelight); of the girls, 12-10, 16-24, 18-35, and 28-41, crystallizing their record at a dignified 7-11 overall, and a bit less so league record of 1-7; and of the varsity boys, 10-19, 16-34, 27-53, and 38-64.
The cheerleaders furnished us with a refreshing watering-hole on the way per usual, commanding gravity with peremptorality of which we who are implanted stiffly on the earth could never dream of, one stunt executed of particular virtuosity whereof two “flyers”, yclept Cadience Hewett and Ava Patane were hoisted ento plein air where, as if they were suspended, they contorted their legs such that they are very nearly perpendicular to their bisectional meridian in union with their contra-extremities stretched to their extremity in grabbing the respective toes. It sounds rather pleonastically antiseptic when I attempt to lay it out, but I assure you, it was quite the arresting exploit to behold.
It was, altogether, a rather morose perorint of the season insofar as wins and losses dictate sensibilities, but perhaps a focused dilation upon such accounting proves myopic when contrasted to loftier attainments, both Coach Mikayla Bumgarner of the girls and Coach Benjamin Salberg of the boys’ varsity attesting much to this effect, free of a scintilla of morbidity or melancholy: the former annunciating that “this was my first year coaching them as a group….I feel like I walked in, not that much older than them, and they were the sweetest group of girls I have ever met in my entire life [what are points to such panegyric praise! which confers naches not just upon this assuredly lovely group of girls, but to the factitious facticity of their incubation], and they all wanted to get better and they wanted to learn more. I feel like I had their full, undivided attention for the whole season. We grew, in being a team, to learning all new plays….I mean, I completely changed their whole dynamic of playing, and they followed it, and it worked, and they did amazing, and I’m proud of them.” The professed tractability and dexterity wherewith the girls conformed to the novel plays introduced presupposed, we can soberly anticipate that given the experience with which they shall now wield their arsenal, and Coach Mikayla can guide their tactics, matters can “work” even more amazingly in the next season.
Coach Ben, who was at the time mildly preoccupied by the prospect of unwinding in conference with his dog, likewise stated: “Dude, it was a good season. I think, like in life, you’re gonna lose a lot more than you win, and the people who win all the time, in sports or in highschool, the most popular people, they get a big reality check when life hits them, because eventually, you know, everybody loses [as Fitzgerald once put it in a deliciously mordant aphorism, they are those “who achieved such an acute, limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax”]…. [With t]he lessons they’ve had to go through this year, they’ve matured so much, and I know all these men, all these young men are going to go on to achieve great things. I’m not thinking in terms of wins and losses, I’m thinking in terms of the lessons that they learned, you know, that’s going to last them a life time.”
And with all the grinning faces abound, proud in their friend’s, or their child’s, or their student’s developement, it is not hard to assent to such assuaging principles as these. The seniors honoured in question, of both varsity teams and the cheerleading squad were, enumerated: Brianna Hayes, Bella Haselton, Jabari Chapman, Izaijah Bass, Dylan Garcia, AJ Taylor, Brian Patton, Paige Dearth, Gwenith Fellner, Stacey Hickman, Katie Schneider, and Jett Young. The ceremony consisted in the trotting out of each prize with their progenitors, a snapping of a toothsome photograph, and the reading of a prepared statement drafted by each personage, a common through-line of which was the lauding of the ideals of friendship obtaining from their coherence as a team. All shall be lustily desiderated in their desertion of us, and, more particularly, that of their respective teams, but such shall proffer to the up-and-comers their just desserts in an opportunity to man the helm and garner éclat.
If the reader derides or chides my praise as fulsomatory or otherwise dissimulatory, look no further than the fact that the lunary acrobat, hight Benson Boone journeyed out to bask in our joint fêting, construed as all the more queer in that God was granted an explicit declaration of gratitude in absentia, but then again we would have been impelled by our constitutional duty to pursue his extradition to Ohio. Mr. Boone improvidently proved neither as limbersome nor as mellifluous as was foretold, so perhaps he was rather put out by our losses and could not come around to imbibe in the platitudinous bromides on offer; well, he can soak his head for all we care, for we our oh-so delighted in the probity and pertinacy wherewith our teams have acquitted themselves time and again in defiance to the lulling or disaffecting canards of supposed vanquishment. Huzzah for the seniors, huzzah for CORE Butte! may its name ring forth in glory for sempiternality! (though probably not for its prodigious athleticism)
