The eastern Maine basketball extravaganza commonly known as Tournament Week has long been our poor-boy equivalent of Mardi Gras. It is a time when inhabitants of the outlying territories – cabin-feverish from the harsh northern winter, many of them ready to bay at the moon – descend upon Bangor, determined to kick back, root for the home team while enjoying some quality high school basketball, renew old acquaintances and generally behave as though on well-earned holiday.

If memory serves (and it would be no great surprise if it didn’t), the annual high school basketball tournaments for smaller schools once upon a time began early Monday morning of the week of Washington’s birthday and continued seemingly nonstop through Saturday night, by which time champions of both genders in Classes B, C and Dhad been crowned.

Then the sponsoring Maine Principals Association, a group that loves tinkering with the system as much as any weekend mechanic of old ever loved to poke and prod amongst the innards of a Model T Ford, decided it was time for a tune-up. It decreed that the tournament should begin two days earlier, on the Saturday preceding tournament week, presumably to ease the scheduling jam while coincidentally whetting fan appetite for The Big Show to come.

The Saturday gig worked so well that the MPA figured a Friday start would work even better, and so Friday it became, which is how the Hermon and Winslow High School girls’ teams found themselves jumping the gun at 3:05 p.m. yesterday. Can a Thursday evening tipoff be far behind? Give the MPA tinkerers enough time to further monkey around and they’ll soon be a full week ahead of themselves.

No matter. Truth be told, the tournament can’t start soon enough for most die-hard fans of high school basketball here in The Real Maine. MPA-induced calendar creep wherein it pertains to Tournament Week may be of some concern to old fogy hard-shell traditionalists, but not to your average bear, I’d guess.

Whatever the designated dates, down from The Valley and from Washburn and Hodgdon will come the basketball fanatics, in droves, and out of coastal villages from Camden to Lubec. They’ll emerge from deepest Piscataquis County, drop by from Bangor’s surrounding bedroom communities and carpool from East Millinocket and Lee and Danforth – perhaps for the overnight, perhaps not, depending upon how things turn out. Regardless of whether the old home team is in the tournament lineup, before the week is out a preponderance of eastern Maine communities will be represented in the stands by a basketball nut of some degree, so great is the pull of the annual ritual.

For hundreds of kids participating in the ballgames, playing in the tournament before huge crowds at the venerable Bangor Auditorium will be a dream come true. Show me an athlete who has participated in the event and I will show you a person who, decades later, will remember every detail about the experience. Details embellished with the passage of time, perhaps, depending upon their importance in the outcome of the game. But never forgotten.

As for the participating teams, there are overwhelming favorites to win the six regional championships at stake and there are underwhelming underdogs whom no one save the unfavored kids and their coaches gives a snowball’s chance of getting past Round One.

But if experience in such matters teaches the favorites anything, it is this: Beware the underdog with nothing to lose and lots to prove. Take him lightly and odds are that he will be the one to jump up and take a huge bite out of your aspirations while his partisan backers in the bleachers chant mocking suggestions that you should maybe warm up the team bus and start thinking about next year.

Few things in sports – or in life, for that matter – are more inspiring than The Upset Of Mammoth Proportions, in which David whacks Goliath and lives to tell about it. We in the newspaper business are fond of saying that when dawg bites man, few except the biter and the bite-ee take note. But when man bites dawg, that’s news, baby. The concept applies to the tournament now under way.

There are several talented teams in the playoffs sporting perfect 18-0 records in their classification and counting on playing in March for a state championship. Each has a gigantic bulls-eye etched on its back. Maybe each will remain undefeated at 21-0 come Saturday night, after the upstarts have taken their best shots at puncturing the aura of invincibility.

Or maybe not. In such uncertainty lies the beauty of it all.

Columnist Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net