Civil Lore V
“The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory1, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.”
— Nietzsche, ‘On the Use and Abuse of History For Life’ (talking about the last 6 seconds of a tied state playoff game, probably)
I.
It’s late in the game. We’re long past the time, if there even was one, for wisdom, fables, dust-caked historical precedents and back-in-the-day digressions. At this point, the dispensation of advice is not only unsolicited — Who asked? No one, that’s who — but gratuitous, presumptuous, indulgent and unnecessary.
These Jacks seem to have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing. They get it.
(And even if they didn’t, that would be their business and their journey, not ours, we onlookers).
They obviously get it, and have for months (at least), and probably have all along. That much is clear and easily observed and uncontroversially so.
I’m not talking about their gaudy record2, their spice-rack highlight reel, their all-GSHL accolades, the all-state recognition3 coming their way in due time, their Civil War winning streak, the deservedly high regard with which they’re held by media4 and coaches5 and regional seeding committee,6 their capacity to extract glistening victory from the muck (think of the last five seconds at Ridgefield, the last 90 seconds against Tumwater), their ability to devour a double-digit second-half deficit in high-stakes environs with one of their best players hobbled and one of their best players marooned in the penalty box of foul trouble. It’s less tangible than these touchstones, or any other trinket from the on-paper, in-pixel, mind’s-eye trove.
Nah. You can just see that they get it. “They get it” is the best approximate translation of how they play, of what their style of play says about who they are, about their esteem for one another, for their coaches, for the game. That identity is as clear in their demeanor during tough times (the first half against White River, the whole dang game against Tumwater) as it is in the good times, the moments of pure flow on the break, when they’re moving and sharing the ball like a ten-armed monte dealer and running the court like shivers travel spine, and the bench sees an alley-oop coming a nanosecond before the rest of the gym and tips it by jumping first. In the subtle prayer Cavin Holden gestured after his first make in the regional playoff. In the carefree laugh Jamond Harris and Aaron Ofstun shared after the big man’s dunk7 attempt during mop-up time didn’t fall.
These Jacks don’t need pointers or history lessons. They have worked hard. They are supremely well-coached. They don’t need their exploits, or the unabashed and impervious fun with which they’ve conjured them, put in context, because the season they’ve custom mounted is the context for Lumberjack squads going forward.
This season is the new blueprint, the new founding document, for RAL hoops.
These Jacks have operated in a unique time signature, it seems, for the duration of this marvelous quest. Somehow, suddenly, that quest has — at most — 96 minutes of basketball remaining (give or take a double-overtime or three) before this season, this precise combination of players and coaches, recedes inexorably into the afterlife of legend, or what The Boss called “Glory Days.”
This season snuck by fast, no? Its final week will race by quickly. Deceivingly quick, to quote Jeray Key’s perfect description8 of Holden’s playing speed.
This season has rewritten program history and reshaped the school’s hoops legacy, and these seismic reformations cannot be undone or rewound in Yakima. They are permanent. Soon, however — along with whatever grace notes and ghost syllables the Jacks mix into the SunDome gumbo this week — they’ll congeal into a fixed, past matter of record.
Soon, as in no later than Saturday night.
Soon.
But finally — at last, Etta James might say — the R.A. Long boys’ basketball program is within dreaming distance of, well, you know what. For the first time since the dawning of (by any reasonable definition) the “modern” basketball era, and for the only time since becoming, by subdivision, who and what they are now: one high school in the two-high school village perched beside the Columbia River’s final, valedictory dog-leg before its long, sprawling, straightaway yawn into open sea.
This generation of Jacks hoopers won’t know any different. The extraordinary will be their normal. And none of the hundreds of alumni who’ve tuned in by radio or N2 Media livestream or tdn.com or dead tree — or walked into the Lumberdome, some after decades without giving their alma mater a second thought — will begrudge these Jacks this strange new consciousness. We’re in their debt, gladly, without resentment.
I can’t speak for any alumni except myself, but I’m going to anyways.
This run has been a gift, and I don’t just mean the pleasure of watching creative, collaborative, relentless, joyful, team basketball — although that has been most excellent. I mean something else.
It’s a form of superpower, being able to transport gyms full of mostly-masked mostly-strangers backward, into regions of memory long dormant. To make them remember distant versions of themselves, very old friendships, the Olympic Elementary teacher9 who sparked their love of reading and writing, the Monticello teachers with whom they read Egyptian mythology10 and Edgar Allen Poe11, or whose calm, quiet, nonnegotiable moral compass taught them never to bully12; the R.A. Long teachers who taught them Plato’s Allegory of the Cave13 and Shakespeare14; the coaches15 who always had their backs, even during awful football seasons; the baseball coach16 who had the whole team over to eat chili he cooked and watch the NCAA national championship game in whichever season Hudson’s Bay was going to spoil (three &%$%&@#ing times!!) on the final out of the year.
Trust me: it is possible to deeply miss the past even when, and sometimes because, it was littered with defeat. These Jacks are time-travel agents. They haven’t merely gathered old friends and dozens of graduated classes together in the present. They’ve reminded us what some of our first real experiences of together felt like, and meant, and disclosed how those formative tribulations are still, right now, inflecting the convalescing vicissitudes of adult life.
This season matters that way, even though that’s not why, or for whom, it matters foremost.
This season is about this team, which bore the frustration of missing the 2021 district tournament after dominating the league, then circled the wagons this year when Ofstun missed a crucial stretch of the season with an injury, then rallied around Cavin Holden and assistant coach Jamal Holden in the regional round when the junior and his father were grieving the loss of Thomas Holden (Cavin’s grandfather, Jamal’s father).
“This is a family and we knew we were going to get it done for them,” Key told TDN’s Ryan Peerboom after the Jacks handled White River, confirming what was already so vivid and legible — and bore, especially in the second half, the hallmarks of a jubilant family reunion and a reverent homegoing — on the court that night.
I would hope — and hoping is different than advising or recommending, and is definitely not the same as predicting — that the Jacks family, especially the seven-man rotation and coaching triumvirate responsible for this odyssey, can lean fully into its final summit steps with a sense of ease, freedom and play. I hope time slows down this week, so that the in-between spaces of practices, cross-mountain transit, team suppers, hotel chill-time, and so forth, can be savored. I hope they get to malinger and marinate in those more private moments, make those as much a part of the celebration as the portion they’ll share with the rest of us, in the Dome.
And then? Go do what they’ve done all season, which is play a fearless, never dull, sometimes frenetic, usually eloquent, always unified style of basketball; for their school, their town, their coaches, their families, all these graying and long-winded alumni they’ve never met or heard of.
And most of all, for each other.
Thanks, Jacks.
“Reach out your hand, if your cup be empty,
If your cup is full, may it be again”— Jerome Garcia / Robert Hunter, ‘Ripple’
II.
The Jacks dismantled White River in the second half of a 2A state regional at Ted M. Natt Court on Saturday, that emphatic, 72-58 victory sending RAL to its first state tournament quarterfinal since 1953.
RAL will play either Tumwater or Grandview at 7:15 p.m. on March 3 in the Yakima Valley SunDome.
(Check out the 2A bracket here)
Fourteen of the 16 teams which qualified for the state regional round this season had played in a state semifinal before, and 15 of 16 had advanced to at least one quarterfinal.
Only Lakewood (a relative neophyte on the state’s high school sports scene, having come into being in 1982) has never played in the Final 8. The Cougars from Arlington, located in North Snohomish County, made their only state appearance in 2020 -- the last time a state tournament was contested -- and lost a first-round game to Lindbergh. (COVID-19 cancelled the ’21 tourney). Lakewood plays Sehome on Wednesday in a first-rounder, with 10-time state champion Lynden awaiting that winner in a quarterfinal. The winner of that quarterfinal will face the winner of the R.A. Long quarterfinal at 9 p.m. on Friday with a spot in the state title game on the line.
Franklin Pierce High School of Tacoma (est. 1952) is the only squad other than Lakewood which entered the Final 16 in 2022 without a semifinal under its belt. The Cardinals were a 2020 participant and reached the quarterfinals in 2006. They face Port Angeles (seeking its first state quarterfinal since 1997) in a first-round game on Wednesday, hoping to avoid elimination and earn a quarterfinal crack at top-ranked, defending champion North Kitsap.
Seven of the Final 16 teams this season played in the last state tournament (2020); all seven of those teams are still alive among the 12 remaining SunDome carpetbaggers. Each of the other 15 state participants, including the 11 who’ll join the Jacks in Yakima this week to determine a champion, had played in a state tournament more recently than the Jacks (2008), with Port Angeles (2011) ending the second-longest drought of the field, this year. Eleven of the Final 16 had been to state as recently as 2018.
Of the 12 programs still swaggering, nine have played in at least one state championship game, and seven – Lynden, Grandview, Prosser, White River, Sehome, Pullman, and North Kitsap – have won at least one title. All four teams which were eliminated in the regional round have played in a state title tilt before, and two (W.F. West, Mark Morris) have won at least one championship.
The Monarchs are three-time state champs and seven-time finalists.
Of the four teams that earned byes into the quarterfinals, Pullman (2019), North Kitsap (2020) and Lynden (2020) have current players with state semifinal minutes on their curriculum vitae.
You have to go back to the 1952-53 Lumberjacks of Gary Earnest and Leroy Nelson for first-person tales of a state Final 4. MMHS did not yet exist; in the Longview Daily News’ reporting from that era, I could not find a reference to “R.A. Long” in the stories saluting that team’s state wins over Clarkston (in the first round) and Bellingham (in the quarterfinals) at the University of Washington’s Edmundson Pavilion. Just “Longview’s explosive Lumberjacks….outclassing a scrappy Clarkston five…in a fast moving game,” and “Coach Joe Moses’ hustling Longview Lumberjacks….chopping down the Bellingham Red Raiders,” with every school-name reference to “Longview” thereafter.
R.A. Long, which was established in the late 1920s, has never played in a boys’ basketball state championship game.
Bonus links
Kirshenbaum’s excellent feature story on RAL’s history-making coaching staff
Kirshenbaum’s “state basketball tracker”
Andy Buhler’s 2A state preview — lots of Jacks content here
In ancient Greek religion, the goddess of victory was Nike.
R.A. Long is 20-2. It is undefeated against Class 2A teams.
The author of this midseason glance, hoops guru Andy Buhler, told me on Feb. 17 that his “written-in-pencil POY watch list for 2A isn't much different from where it was a month ago.” And that was before the district championship game.
RAL was ranked third by the state’s sportswriters in the final AP poll of the season on Feb. 9, and second in SBLive’s final power rankings on Feb. 23.
The Jacks finished the season ranked third in the final coaches’ poll of the year.
RAL was seeded third in the 16-team field. Kudos to the committee. Although the seeding process could benefit from a mote more transparency, they nailed it: 87.5 percent of the 2A regional games were won by the higher seed.
One of the few shots Ofstun missed against White River, which had no answer for the senior center. Ofstun had 24 points, seven rebounds and three blocked shots.
I’m thinking of the moment in Josh Kirshenbaum’s crackling game story from Feb. 15, when Key called Holden “deceivingly quick.”
Here’s the full quote: “He can fill it up no matter what. Teams defensively plan around him, but the kid can get it going. Teams try to pressure him full-court, but the thing about him is that he’s deceivingly quick. The kid’s long, he has long strides, he can handle the ball, he can take contact. He’s the total package.”
Holden is also the traditional kind of quick. But this phrase, from Key’s shrewd basketball mind, perfectly distills the uncanny ways that Holden exploits angles and openings with singular syncopation, and at times can seem like the only player on the floor who can sense ellipses in the game clock, or obscured gaps and seams in courtspace. It reminds me of the way some bards wedge extra syllables into verses or even words — like Daniel Dumile (RIP) saying “stereo” with five syllables so that it rhymes with “everywhere he go,” or Yasiin Bey pronouncing “mojo” with an extra half-syllable — in a way that is both pleasing to the ear and simultaneously, and sophisticatedly, performs the meaning of the word that has been alchemized.
Leslie Glaze.
Stan Smith.
Jan Johnson.
Mike McElliott.
John Foges.
Jim LeMonds.
Numerous, but especially Chris Fritsch, Kyle Fowler, Jon Minium, and Rick St. Jean.
Mike Polis.