When Douglas High senior cross country runner Whitney Lindsey crossed the finish line nearly 18 seconds ahead of her nearest competition at the Northern 4A Regional Championships at Rancho San Rafael Park in Reno last week, the fact that she'd become the school's first female individual champion in the sport was impressive enough on its own.
Add to it though, that Lindsey completed the most impressive season of individual sports in the school's history, and the moment becomes even more special.
Lindsey's win was the third individual regional championship for the Tigers this fall.
In fact, of the three female individual titles contested this fall (tennis, golf, cross country), Douglas won all of them.
The first two were from freshman phenoms, Amelia Ritger in tennis and Bethany Wurster in golf, but Lindsey's was a while in coming.
The senior came into her third season on the Tiger cross country team with a full head of steam and 300 miles of offseason work already under her belt and she raced through her final year with the historic championship.
In a fall season that saw Douglas qualify for the playoffs in every team sport (a tough accomplishment by any means, but not at all uncommon in Carson Valley), it was the individual sports that stepped up and made perhaps the loudest statement of all.
While Ritger and Wurster still have three more seasons ahead of them, Lindsey will be ending her career this weekend at the state championships.
Junior Taylor Biaggi, however, stands in line to make a shot at defending the title for Douglas after qualifying for state for the third consecutive season as well this year.
Regardless of what actually ends up happening, this particular group of athletes has made the individual sports across the board at Douglas more interesting to watch than perhaps at any other time in the school's history.
We'll wait eagerly to see what happens next.
As expected, the Douglas High football team will get a replay of the season-opener this week at home against Reed in the first round of the Northern 4A Regional playoffs.
It stands to be a good game on all sides of the ball. The Tiger offense has improved every week, with their hallmark game of the season coming against rival Carson last week as they rolled up more than 500 yards of total offense in a 48-20 win.
Reed has size and speed on defense, and can make the big play, as evidenced by the three turnovers caused in the first quarter against Douglas earlier this year.
It will be interesting to see who has had the most improvement through the course of this season during Friday night's game.
On the other side, Reed's Zack Parker is simply the best all-around offensive player in the North.
The dual-threat quarterback can cause pain in a variety of ways, but he'll be going up against the top total defense in the North in Douglas.
The Tigers have progressively gotten better defensively since the opening-week struggle against the Raiders and have shown an apptitude for making the big stop late in the game.
Whatever the score ends up being, the game promises to be entertaining.
Another team that earned a rematch is the Douglas girls' soccer team.
The Tigers won their playoff opener 2-1 in overtime against Elko.
South Tahoe survived on penalty kicks against an upstart Spanish Springs squad, so Wednesday night will be a reset of last Tuesday's regular-season finale.
Tahoe looked good against the Tigers in the cramped confines of Keith "Duke" Roman field, but the extra width of Damonte Ranch's field (the site of all soccer playoff games this year) may prove to be beneficial to the Lady Tigers.
Douglas struggled making a connection between its forwards and its defense last week and as a result didn't mount much of an attack offensively against the Vikings.
South Tahoe, on the other hand, put together a number of pretty scoring plays and capitalized on two of them to pick up the win.
Expect the wider field to open up the middle enough for the Tigers to string a couple of opportunities together. The Vikings have the best group they've had in years, so it'll be a battle, but if the ball can bounce the right way, Douglas has a shot at an upset.
It's hard to tell which was more ill-advised.
During the Douglas-Tahoe girls' soccer game last week, a South Tahoe student approached a crowd of onlookers and proceeded to shout a string of expletives at them. Unbeknownst to our shouter, a couple of Douglas High administrators were standing in the middle of the crowd.
After Carson took a brief 6-0 lead with 29 seconds left in the first quarter of the Carson-Douglas football game Thursday night, the Carson student section began chanting "overrated" repeatedly. Douglas, as mentioned above, won 48-20 while senior running back Brock Peterson ran for a school record 343 yards.
Which of those wants that moment back more? Discuss.
The overrated chant is one of the worst in all of sports.
It simply doesn't do anyone any good.
The idea, of course, is that you beat someone ranked much higher than you and thus they didn't deserve to be ranked that high.
While most on the outside would probably end up agreeing, when you chant that particular phrase at a game, you're just cheapening your own team's performance.
Think about it. Let's say you're Middle-of-Nowhere High School and you just took out the top-ranked team in the entire country.
You want everyone else to know that you just beat the best team in the country.
The last thing you'd want anyone else saying is that while the team was indeed ranked No. 1, there were several other teams that probably had a better case for the top ranking and that the team you beat is really just very overrated and not at all a true No. 1.
It'd drive you nuts if someone from outside your own school talked about such an upset win that way. It takes the literal luster off of the win.
How much more so does it cheapen the win when your own fans are saying it, shouting it at the other team, before the game is even over?
You're essentially just saying, we're really not that great at all and it's an embarassment to your team that you would lose to someone as lowly as us.
Sure it'll grate the other team, but it also makes your team look bad in the process.
If everyone else in the world thinks that the losing team is indeed overrated, go ahead and let them think that. Don't help them along in that thought.
If I got to vote in the postseason honors selection (and I don't), this is what my ballot would look like based on the season up to this last week:
1. Zack Parker, Reed; 2. Brock Peterson, Douglas; 3. Chris Castellanos, North Valleys; 4. Styker Ngongseke, McQueen; 5. Glenn Wallace, Reno
