Sometimes it hurts to keep score

Here’s a profound statement for you, and I just came up with it myself: Winning feels great.

Oh, and losing hurts real bad.

I don’t have to explain this to anybody with a child who plays sports at any level, but I guess I will anyway.

Late Tuesday night, I was standing in line at a fast food joint in Warner Robins. Two of my sons were with me. One of them was wearing his baseball uniform and the other was wearing our school colors.

The woman standing in front of us was wearing the colors of the team that had just beaten us in extra innings and eliminated us from the high school playoffs after we’d been one out away from winning by four runs.

She turned around and congratulated us on having such a good team and playing the game “the right way” and building the character of their boys by playing them tough but not actually beating them.

We’d just lost a crazy game involving dubious calls and weird bounces. All we wanted was a hamburger before getting back on one of the most mind-numbing stretches of highway in America.

Instead, we had to stand there and listen to the most annoying kind of fan: the overly gracious winner.

It would have been better if she’d rattled a cowbell in our faces, danced a victory jig and been done with it.

Why did she feel so great and we felt so rotten? Why was she so magnanimous and we so anti-social?

Because we were keeping score. One team had to win and one team had to lose.

To us, the losers, it didn’t feel right and it didn’t feel fair, but it was final.

But we don’t have to keep score with everything. Take Page One, for example.

Last week, the Ledger-Enquirer hosted our 41^st Page One Awards ceremony by recognizing the best of the area’s high school students in 13 different categories, including science, mathematics and, yes, athletics.

A decade or so ago, we used to close the show by recognizing the school that had produced the most winners. That went over like a ton of bricks. The audience would actually boo.

We eventually got the message and discontinued the practice of recognizing schools during the ceremony. But we remain more committed than ever to the true mission of Page One, which is identifying and honoring exceptional students in our community, regardless of where they go to school.

A reader and former Page One judge reminded us last week of this bit of history after he’d seen a scorecard of sorts in our newspaper coverage of Page One.

In the story’s fifth paragraph, we mentioned which schools had the most winners. On top was Columbus High, the city’s total magnet school. Yeah, no kidding.

This touched a nerve with our friend and reminded him of the old days when we recognized schools during our show. He felt like our story diminished the mission of Page One because we were keeping a tally.

He has a good point.

Of course, people are naturally going to add up the individual winners themselves, especially if they think their school has a shot at “winning.” And that’s fine.

But from a news standpoint, this is about individual students and their stories. This doesn’t mean we’ll never keep score in our stories ever again. Three years ago, the winners in the first three categories were from Spencer High School. I’ll never forget the chill of excitement that went through the audience. It was like the 1980 Winter Olympics and Al Michaels was yelling, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” Susan Andrews, then the Muscogee County superintendent, even burst into tears.

That was about as close to a sporting event as Page One gets. But it’s not a sporting event, and the point is not to keep score.

We haven’t forgotten that.

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 10:46 AM with the headline "Sometimes it hurts to keep score."