Point of View: The Best I’ve Seen

Middletown High School, where the state boys soccer Final Four games were played recently, is the Taj Mahal of high schools, the size, I thought, of at least two airports.

An eight-lane track wraps around a large turf field overlooked by a Jumbotron — yes, a Jumbotron — and at the other end is a large grandstand over which a commodious press box stretches. I tend to stay away from press boxes, though, preferring a ground-level view, as close to the action as possible.

We, my photographer friend, Craig Macnaughton, and I (when it comes to picture-taking, I am John the Baptist to his Jesus Christ) arrived Sunday morning at least two hours in advance of the East Hampton-Greece Athena final. He went off to check the lighting and to soak up the atmosphere while I took a bag of balls and my racket to the tennis courts, hidden from view around the school’s backside. He told me, by the way, that the stadium’s lighting was of Super Bowl quality.

The patched tennis courts with lonely piles of leaves in the corners clearly hadn’t been beneficiaries, as I was told the turf stadium had been, of a New York State “excel grant.” And there was goose shit all over the lacrosse fields above the courts. There’s always a worm in the apple.

Of course what sticks in my craw the most is the fact that our star player, Nick West, because his left foot had been stepped on and broken by an opposing player in the semifinal, never got a chance to play in what would have been the biggest game of his high school career.

With him I’m quite sure we would have won. Defensively, he would have given Greece Athena’s 6-foot-6-inch center midfielder a run for his money, and he would have sparked our offense as well, as he had in the first half against Jamesville-DeWitt the previous day, before he had to be sidelined for the rest of the game because of his injury.

In the final, it was one bad break after another as key players, either because of injuries or cardings, were withdrawn, one after another, from the field of play, the last, after a Greece Athena player had flopped in front of him, being East Hampton’s stout-hearted defender, Bryan Oreamuno, whose late grandfather, Enrique Leon, was one of the first to come here, in the late 1960s, from Costa Rica.

Oreamuno, who had been called earlier for a foul as he contested a 50-50 ball at the top of East Hampton’s penalty box (a referee’s gift that resulted in a 2-1 Greece Athena lead), was in tears, and five and a half minutes later most everyone was in tears or choked up — the players, who had been dreaming of a state title since they began kicking a ball around together at the ages of 5 or 6, the coaches, who had made of these talented ball-handlers a great team, and the some 300 fans who’d made the trip upstate.

Rich King, East Hampton’s coach, was right when he said afterward in reply to a sportswriter’s question that he didn’t think Greece Athena was the better team, though it had been, he said, on that day.

Later, once we were back, Craig emailed me that he’d gone with his wife to drown his sorrows at Townline BBQ, and that while they were there, the team and its coaches had come in, all seemingly in good spirits.

I, who had spent a while recounting to my wife on my return all of the day’s bad breaks and injustices, my eyes welling up again as I did so, was glad to hear it, that they knew they were a great team.

The best one I’ve ever seen, Greece Athena included.

As we pulled out of the massive parking lot, I thought of what Mike Burns had said after our softball team had lost a state final in Binghamton about 10 years ago, to wit, that the other team had to return to Glens Falls, while we got to go back to Bonac.