Hi everyone, This story appeared in the _Bangor Daily News_ sometime in April of 1992. (I'm sorry I don't have the exact date.) I was a Senior at Maine that year and I attended the NCAA quarterfinal game Maine played at Providence v. Michigan State. I watched Scott Pellerin's pain as the final buzzer of his college career sounded. I read the story I had up on my wall of room and thought some other people on the list might like to read it. I think it applies to every team at some time or another, especially in a fan's eyes. I really liked it and I hope some of you do too. As the playoffs start, I'd like to wish all the teams good luck. I'll be out at the Final Four even though my team won't be. I hope to see some of you there. The story was written by Leigh McCarthy a free-lance columnist who lives in Bangor. All credit goes to her. The typing mistakes are mine. SOMETIMES THE BEST TEAM LOSES Why do I care? The season's been over for weeks now. What difference does it make if the college hockey team I follow lost out at the championship showdown in March? Did the sky fall? It did not. Did the cosmos shudder? Hardly. Was life in any real way altered because the team I track all winter never made it to Albany for the NCAA tournament? No. I'm trying to figure it out. A dark disappointment in my innards, right about where my appendix should be, thumps each time I remember what happened to my team. I have a newly acquired sigh that breathes itself ruefully and involuntarily out whenever I think on what might have been. And I am sorry for my team in that paralyzed, painful way parents have of being sorry when they are required to stand by and watch their offspring do battle with the vagaries of blunt reality. How I could get so attached to the hockey fortunes of a bunch of young strangers is the damnedest thing. Eleven years ago I first began to pay attention to the hockey team at the university. In the beginning the game was a flying riddle. But I got to know the rules. I learned to identify players by number. I got so I could predict which opponents regularly would play chippy, which fast, which with distinguised finesse. My team evolved over the years. Players left. New recruits joined. A new coach arrived. The team's karma burgeoned. Winning became a habit. It all got pretty heady. Still, I never quite got used to the ultimately ritualized yearly expectation that the team would wind up its season amoung collegiate hockey's Final Four. I never could come to take that for granted. Every year the team earned a chance to play for the national championship seemed a great gift. There's a reason for that. By the time a person gets to be my age she knows too well how may wrenches are out there waiting to throw themselves into a championship season. She knows how hard it is to get to a tournament and how much harder still to win. A championship season means more than winning hockey games. To earn a championship a team has to beat not only all the other teams but fate as well. So much time and attention is lavished on statistics of sport a casual observer might think the appeal of college hockey lies in plus/minus calculations, in points accrued and goals-against averages, in the win/loss column. But the ultimate appeal of hockey, like that of any sport cannot be transformed to numbers on a newspaper page. It lies in that soul place from which mortals dare to gather as a force and move against the vagaries of reality, from which we dare together to go up against fate. We watchers don't attach to a team's numbers. We attach to its collective heart. Last week Ann Arbor students trashed their surroundings after their University of Michigan basketball team lost its championship game with Duke. In their frenzy to refute the too-terrible implications of obvious failure in an extension of themselves, they roared. People got hurt. It was a painful misapprehension and easy to fall into. Those of us more honed by life, though, never roar when a team loses, even if it's our team, the one we follow, the one to which we attach. There's nothing like experience to demostrate how meanly the vagaries of reality can toy with skill and preparation and natural ability. Sometimes the best team wins, but sometimes it doesn't. Winning isn't exactly the same thing as being the best. It's a more jagged notion than that. Winning is a zigzag between skill and fate. And if winning doesn't measure as much as it might appear, losing doesn't measure as little. Losing is just the other half of the zigzag battle between skill and fate. We who are already honed know how disorder can intervene in the universe. What might have been a close call becomes a rolling puck that jiggles itself quicker that reason behind a stretching goalie's leg to rack up a quirk of an enemy goal. Sometimes, even when everything else seems as if it ought to be right, he tumblers on a winning combination just don't fall into place. I know that. I'm as honed as the next guy. I understand how fate's tumblers stuck for my hockey team. But what I am trying to understand, if I know that, is why I care and why it is so hard to lose that last game. I believe it is because I'm afraid the young strangers whose team I follow will take their loss to much to heart. I'm afraid they don't yet know that fate is still in the process of teaching them how the cynosure in victory is in fact thanksgiving. I wish I could be sure they understand that some season when they have worked, when their skill is practiced and their determination fixed, the tumblers will fall into place. It will happen. When it does, the young strangers who play hockey I watch will remember how easy it was for the stars to whirl accomplishments out of the clutches of their control. And in their gratitude that the zigzag teeth of fate finally let them pass by to reach what they have earned they will find the championship, when it comes, the sweetest thing. Sarah Foster Maine Black Bear in Baltimore.