The Saline Reporter
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Thumbs up for The Tie
Jerry Hinnen
PUBLISHED: March 27, 2008
If you follow Michigan high school sports, you've probably already heard about — and debated the pros and cons of — The Tie.
Advertisement
Heck, you might have heard of The Tie even if you just follow sports at all. It's gotten national attention, including a front-page piece by columnist Mary Buckheit for ESPN.com. It's the sort of issue that everyone's going to have some sort of opinion on; it wouldn't surprise me at all if you've already heard someone else offer theirs.
But here's where I'm going to offer mine about The Tie, the now-famous -- or infamous, depending on your perspective -- 1-1 draw in the Michigan Division 1 hockey championship finals, held between Marquette and Orchard Lake State Mary's March 15.
If you know very, very little about hockey, you might wonder why the Michigan High School Athletic Association didn't have a tiebreaker system in place for the championship game. More likely, you know that the two teams in fact played eight scoreless sudden-death overtime periods before officials declared the game a tie.
It was the longest high school hockey game in Michigan history, but even that description doesn't do the epic length of this contest justice. By game's end, the two teams had spent 109 minutes on the ice, more than double the regulation 45. By comparison, a high school basketball game that lasted as long in proportion to regulation time as The Tie would have gone into 23 overtimes.
The differences inherent between hoops and hockey mean that that's not a perfect comparison, but it's not that far off. Marquette and St. Mary's didn't just play to what we'd collectively agree was "the limit;" they played beyond it and then kept going. Coaches talk a lot about dedication and effort, and I can't imagine any better example of effort than not one but two teams willing to give it their all and more for 109 minutes.
Which is why I think the MHSAA officials' decision to let the two teams share the championship was absolutely the right one.
There are two schools of thought on the "effort" angle. One is that after the kids had poured that much sweat and guts into the game, it was unfair to tell them that even that wasn't enough to declare a winner; that in terms of a result, all that effort didn't mean anything.
But that point-of-view takes the draw to mean that neither team won. It would be much, much more accurate in this case to say that the draw mean that both teams won. Both teams will get a trophy, not neither. Both teams will hang a banner, both can rightly call themselves champions.
And isn't that the way it should be? After playing beyond exhaustion, how unbelievably cruel would it have been for one team or the other to score early in that hypothetical ninth overtime and send the other home (in Marquette's case, a long way home) with nothing to show for an effort for the ages?
I know that winning is important. It's what defines of competition. It would still probably be a good idea, in light of The Tie, for the MHSAA to institute a shoot-out after a set number of overtimes.
But we — virtually all of us who love and follow high school sports — say over and over again that winning and losing at this level isn't always a matter of points and scoreboards and records. It's a matter of heart and dedication and 5 a.m. wake-up calls and two-a-days in August heat and 10-mile runs in the snow and never, ever giving up.
We say that any high school athlete who does these things is a winner, regardless of talent, regardless of results.
After the eighth overtime of The Tie, the MHSAA officials were essentially being asked if they really believed that or not. Which really was more important: the scoreboard, and what it said about the teams, or the effort, and what that said about the teams?
In declaring The Tie, the MHSAA backed up its words. It agreed that commitment is what makes us winners. It reminded us of what's truly important about these games that we love, and it — like the players who skated off that ice with nothing left and everything in hand — should be applauded.
Not all stories are guaranteed to appear
online. The Web edition contains a reasonable
sampling of the print edition stories.
For the most complete news coverage, we invite you to
subscribe
to the print edition of the paper.
Expanded
Web
Coverage
Staff Blog, "Inside The Newsroom"
TOP JOBS
