There’s been a little brouhaha brewing out in Hermon over the past couple weeks, as students and parents heard that in order to save some dough and preserve the town’s reputation as a low-tax bedroom community of the thriving metropolis to the East, some changes might be in order.

Make that $400,000 worth of changes. To the education budget. And the projected target? Sports. Extracurricular activities. Elementary school band and foreign language programs.

After considering a tour of Hermon to see if any angry pitchfork-toting mobs were gathering with hopes of skewering the elected officials who’d dared to even threaten such a plan, I allowed myself a few knee-jerk reactions.

I quickly ran out of synonyms for short-sighted, and began muttering the same phrase, over and over and over again.

Bad idea. Bad idea. Verrrrry bad idea.

Now, since the heading on the top of this page says SPORTS, and not ELEMENTARY SPANISH, you may assume I’m going to talk about the proposed extracurricular cuts.

You’d be right. But let’s not make those clich? claims that you always hear in these debates: Sports are not a microcosm of life, and they can’t teach you everything you’ll ever need to know.

But I’ll tell you this: extracurricular activities are important. They matter. And the things you learn as a member of a team (we’re talking about sports here, but I figure it really doesn’t matter much whether you’re on the math team or the chess team … the same dynamics are at work) are things you won’t get in the classroom.

Sports teaches you about life. That much is true. But that’s not the half of it.

If you play a sport, you learn valuable lessons. You learn that silence is sometimes more than golden (like on a dark, half-filled bus with a coach who is fuming after a loss).

You learn that singing do-wop songs in the shower after practice sounds a lot better than anything you and your teammates could ever hope to produce in a studio.

You find out that your coach thinks it’s cool when he works a player so hard that he joins what he calls “The Orange Bucket Brigade.” Use your imagination.

You learn that people who eat a pound of jellybeans in study hall, then go for a 10-mile run, end up wishing for an orange bucket.

You begin a sport thinking that every day is a hard day. Eventually you learn the difference between the hard and easy days your coach has been talking about. Then you graduate, and every day is a hard day … or an easy day (it depends on your perspective, I guess).

You learn which towns have McDonalds. Which ones have Pizza Huts. Which ones have Arbys. And you learn that the best part of every bus trip is the post-competition meal.

You learn that 120-pound distance runners can often pack away two or three quarter-pounders, while 250-pound shot-putters sometimes opt for Happy Meals.

Then 15 or 20 years later, you realize why you always perk up when Van Halen’s “Jump” comes on the radio, or when you hear the beginning shutter-clicks of J. Geils’ “Freeze Frame.”

You learn that you actually remember all that stuff you learned. Including the soundtrack of your high school life … the one that played at high volume out of Christmas-gift boom boxes on cramped buses. Like Van Halen (even though you begged the shot-putters to fortheloveofGod stop playing that SONG).

You remember things that Hermon kids thought they might never get to learn. … though they don’t yet know what they’d miss out on.

It’s more than the wins, you see. It’s more than the losses. It’s more than anything simple like that.

It’s this: You learn.

And this: You remember.

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