Sometimes, conflicts don’t have villains

Meghann Burnett’s story would be easier to tell if it was one of those by-the-numbers sagas with a despicable villain dictating all the action. It’s not.

Meghann is a junior at Nokomis High. She’s smart and funny and polite. And she’s talented in both athletics and the arts.

She’s a reserve on the Nokomis basketball team … the one that just won a state championship. And she’s a star in the jazz ensemble … the one that missed out on a state title by 33/100ths of a point. On the same night. Without her.

“[During the finals], we didn’t have our lead trumpet player,” recounts ensemble director Stan Buchanan, a popular man students often call, simply, “B.”

“That’s like losing your point guard,” says Buchanan. “There’s no difference.”

Buchanan isn’t mad. He loves teaching music – and life – to young people.

But like many, Buchanan would like to see the Maine Principals’ Association move the state basketball games to Friday night.

The MPA, which would make a perfect villain if its position didn’t make so much sense, is reluctant to do that.

Assistant executive director Larry Labrie says the reason is simple. It’s not about money, like Buchanan says it was back when the conflict first arose back in the mid-’80s.

“The concern would be that [it would be more difficult] for the fans to get there on a Friday night contest,” Labrie says.

So, on championship Saturday, Buchanan was in Houlton, and his “point guard,” Meghann, was 120 miles south, getting ready to play in a game she’d dreamt about for years. Ever since she sat in the Bangor Auditorium and watched the big girls play and asked her dad this uniquely Maine question: “When I grow up, can I be a Calais Blue Devil?”

Meghann played her trumpet that Saturday afternoon, helping the ensemble qualify for the night finals. Then, according to a predetermined plan, she headed south, leaving a group Buchanan had tagged “one of his superbands” on its own. The decision was tough.

“Everybody kept telling me, ‘No matter what you do, we’ll all still love you,'” Meghann says. “I was like, ‘Somebody just hate me and tell me what to do.'”

For a week, Meghann looked for an easy answer. She prayed for snow. She flipped a coin. She wept.

Now, the tears have dried up. All that’s left is a lingering case of the what-ifs.

She is, after all, a very good trumpet player. Everyone in the band keeps telling her – good-naturedly, of course – one thing:

If you’d been there, we would have won.

But she wasn’t. She was in Bangor. Want another wrinkle? She didn’t play in the game.

Nokomis basketball coach Anderson says that doesn’t really matter.

“We are a team,” Anderson says. “And we don’t count someone’s importance by how many minutes they played, or how many points they scored.”

There’s really not a villain in Meghann’s story. The jazz competition, after all, isn’t an MPA event, and the MPA wants to keep hoop games on Saturday. Meghann knows the same kind of conflict could happen again next year.

She’s reminded of that every day. Every time she thinks how good things are for one group of her friends … and how good they could have been for another.

“When I sit in jazz ensemble and we have amazing rehearsals where we’ll play so well, then I’ll know that we could have won,” she says.

“But then, I walk into school every day … and there’s that gold ball right there with the picture of us all piled up on the floor.

“I don’t know,” she says quietly, but with a grin. “Sometimes I regret it. And sometimes I don’t.”

John Holyoke is a NEWS sportswriter. His e-mail address is jholyoke@bangordailynews.net