COLUMN: End of the season

I can hardly believe it.

“It” is another affirmation as to why some folks leave their outdoor Christmas lights up all year.

Maybe, as I’ve speculated for so many years, it is not just being lazy.

Could it be a surrender to the rapid passing of yet another year? Is that why people figure they might as well leave them up because seemingly before they can blink they just unbuckled the top button from their post Thanksgiving Day meal and are kicking back on the couch, satisfied, but strangely longing for more?

Is it really already the last weekend of the official high school sports year? Should I just stay planted here at this computer, fingers ready to crank out another sports story instead of leaving the keyboard, walking out of the room and turning out the lights?

What the heck, it will be football season before I know it. Volleyballs will be bouncing off the rafters in gyms throughout the area and the smell of popcorn will be drifting through the atmosphere.

Goes by so fast, I might as well just stay here, poised and ready to tap out another St. Regis or T Falls football story. Is that squeaking sound really that of sneakers on the volleyball courts in Noxon and Hot Springs?

After all, I’m thinking, as soon as the final starter’s pistol splits the Spring quiet this coming weekend, it will be time for the referee to blow his whistle and give the okay to start the game with a kickoff.

The Spring season, believe it or not, comes to a halt this Saturday afternoon with the last track and field events in Laurel and Great Falls for local high schoolers. The last high speed fluorescent ball will have crossed home plate in the softball championships in Billings. Golf wrapped it up this past weekend and tennis closes out their season this coming weekend in Missoula.

Baseball’s state meet is in the books.

The season will go out in a flurry of runners, jumpers, batters and pitchers. Throwers of various sports gear will have put the last shot and flung the last javelin.

High school sports in Montana, save for a few all-star outings, will be over.

But, hark, is that muffled distant sound really the clash of shoulder pads?

Is that snapping coming from the far off sound of a chin strap being secured to a helmet?

This is a version, to me, of the feeling I get when the reality of the last football game of the year comes to an end. The conclusion of the Super Bowl, as I have said before, sends guys like me into the Dark days..of no football.

And after logging thousands of miles in the past few years traveling from Billings to Noxon to Great Falls to Laurel covering sports stories for this area, the last event of the Spring season adds to the “something’s missing” feeling of the great football hiatus.

I will be there, God willing, to watch that last event and photograph one last high school sports contest. Then, I will take a break from doing this insane thing called covering sports.

And I will begin longing for the opening kickoff, the “okay to serve” signal from the volleyball official, and the smell of popcorn or the taste of a Hot Springs maple bar. The site of the Blue Hawks thundering down the ramp from their gym to the glorious grass of the gridiron.

I will weather the storm, flush with memories of Plains’ junior Alexis Demming’s dominance of the shot put and discus events this past year. I will grin thinking of the scrappiness and hustle displayed by St. Regis’s all-sport standout John Pruitt. I will be filled with hope that the amazing youngsters coming up the ranks in Hot Springs, Plains, Superior, T Falls, Alberton, St. Regis and Noxon will fill this old head with more memories.

It will be time to breathe.

It will be the 2024-25 school year.

It will be time again, already, for high school sports in Montana.