Points for Honesty.

Rice Lake lost to New Richmond 14-13 here on a sunny day of playoff football.

Wish it didn't hurt so bad, but truth be told, it does. Having lived in both places, to me NR represents what we called in Property class "The Dead Hand". Old Money, or money rather, influencing too much.

Like many places, wealthy especially, the parents are living off their children these days, through their sports. It was always like this, of course, in America, but the influx of wealth in the past decades... Sports can get a new facility, a new school built. And sports can over-emphasize the organizing structure of the school, if you're not careful...

But back to the game. If you know WIsconsin -- can I say? -- NR is becoming everything I disliked about Hudson: a border river city that was much like the Minnesota suburbs. Softer kids, wealthier more artificial looking parents, something off about the money influence, and where the family and older values fall off...

Rice Lake is less like that; it's a bit more rural and removed up here. Not that I'd kid you the social strata isn't out there in all American public schools and communities, but some influences are more obvious and pervasive than others, I think. (Disclosure: with no children in the system, I'm not an insider observer by any means, but you see it living where you live.)

Back to NR:
the fans booed a ref's call (not good sportsmanship in high school sports); brought in cowbells and stomped and cheered not good plays so much, but anything that went their way. Typical fans -- I can hear you saying. What's wrong with that?

I like the more quiet confidence. We're the smallest school in our conference, while NR prefers to be the biggest fish in their small pond. Going on overall school populations -- NR is growing being so close to the Twin Cities, more bodies to choose from...

Rice Lake, if you look at the men in all seasons, more carries their own weight. Living closer to their earth; reaping what they've sown themselves. NR -- which once boasted a native son, Warren Knowles, in the governor's office -- is the generational more annointed type, where the fellas didn't so much earn what they're living off of, let's leave it at that...

So RL has been feeding too much this season off it's own junior quarterback: a scrambler who can run, evade, throw, and he even punts, which comes in handy when the fake is an option, which was successful today. But it caught up to them.

Not sure if he's the one who missed the point after, when the Warriors pretty much ground it out upfield, before one beautifully timed pass that led them to finally match NR's second touchdown. But we missed the point after, and their damn cowbells went wild. (You're not supposed to bring noisemakers into the high school games either, but that's admittedly just an annoyance of mine, on an open field on an open afternoon, in the sunny 40s.)

I wish you could have seen the catch -- airy pass plays are a rarity in our games at this level -- that brought the ball to the 5-yard line for the final score, before the extra kick was missed. A leap of pure beauty -- sad there are no replays -- and he held on! He managed to hold it, despite getting hit, hard, by the NR defender(s?).

A broken leg, Mal said. The ambulance came, the game delayed before the score, the Warrior taken off to clapping -- from NR too, but no cowbells. You thought they could do it -- win one for their missing man, but the kick just wasn't there. To the side I guess, hard to see from where I was standing, but that was how the ref called it, and their cowbells came out.

So my hurt really, it's little compared to the swelling of a broken, even set, leg, right about now...



ADDED: In case you were wondering,
they were indeed New Richmond from the start, before the historic cyclone of 1899 wiped out 117 lives (the circus -- and the country people -- sadly was in town that day and collectively met their fate) and the town rebuilt.