OK. OK. I know I said the Eastern Maine basketball tournament is great. I know I said the yearly pilgrimage to Bangor by fans from far-flung towns provides one of my favorite times of the year. I know I said the combination of steamy-delicious red hot dogs slathered in mustard, roundballs bouncing off the hardwood and refs getting every single call exactly right make for a wonderful experience.

OK. Maybe I didn’t say the stuff about the refs. But the rest of it? I said it. I meant it. And now I’m confused.

Here’s the problem: After a week in hoop heaven, I’ve had a few days to sit back and ponder the bigger questions in life. I haven’t quite got the chicken-or-the-egg thing completely worked out, and I’m struggling a bit with the mechanisms of a lasting world peace, so I moved on to something more immediate … more local … more Maine.

I started thinking about hoop.

Specifically, I sought the answer to this question:

What in the world happened to the basketball tourney I love so much?

If you don’t understand the question, you were probably waiting for the dog show or WWF wrestling to come back to town, and you ignored the goings-on at the Bangor Auditorium last week.

Here’s the condensed version of the problem: Year One: Maine Principals Association decides open tournament is a good idea. After all, it’ll give every Junior and Juniorette across the hoop-playing state the opportunity to get shellacked one more time before they hang up their sneaks and retire to a career of hot-dog eating and writing about the successes and failures of others.

Blowouts happen. Eight teams show up at the tournament in each class. Earth doesn’t spin off its axis. Gold balls are given out. Players hug. Players cry. MPA rejoices. … and regroups.

Year Two: Welcome to the new-look, new-look tourney, courtesy of some map-makers left over from the when-the-earth-was-flat era.

No more simple East and West. Now we’ve got Southeast. Southwest. Northeast. Northwest.

Confused? It gets better.

Four Northeasters will get to Bangor in each class. Four Southeasters, too. No matter what. No matter if the best eight teams in a given class all happen to be from the same geographic region. No matter if the best team in the opposing sub-region couldn’t beat a peewee team.

Want to know that that means? Go ask Hodgdon. The Hawks went undefeated all year, then ended up facing eventual champ Calais in their Class C boys quarterfinal.

The MPA calls it a crossover quarterfinal. In some states, they call it cruel and inhumane punishment.

In another year, Hodgdon would have gone into the tourney in second place, based solely on Heal Points (which, we’ve been led to believe for years, work perfectly fine). The Hawks may not have advanced any further … that’s just the way the tourney works. But one thing is certain: If the Hawks had kept winning, they wouldn’t have faced Calais until Championship Saturday. The two teams would have been in opposite sides of the bracket.

Everywhere you looked last week, an athletic director was griping about the new-look tourney. And if it wasn’t an AD, it was a coach who complained (always off the record, of course, so as not to perturb their boss by publicly questioning the resulting mess).

The sad part: It’s those bosses – the principals – who have constructed this system. And those same bosses are the only ones who can change it.

We’ll see if that happens. Me? I’ve had my say. Now I’m moving on to something that might be easier to solve. I’m thinking world peace.

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