The letters, e-mails and phone calls probably won’t come this time, or if they do, they’ll be mild and courtesy of people my age whose memory banks are keen, if not a bit biased.
    A while back, a Work of Art column addressed the perils of being a sports editor, a condition being felt by current Optic sports editor Dave Kavanaugh and previous sports eds Khushroo Ghadiali, David Wesner, Jesse Gallegos and a host of others, all the way back to Vince Rivera, a couple of decades back.

    And what do they cite as the toughest part of the job? Traveling with the teams, arriving home in the wee hours and still being expected to churn out a Pulitzer Prize piece of writing? Realizing the film they thought they’d put into their camera somehow was left back home?
    No, the main lament is dealing with fans and parents who ask why the school their kid attends got one column inch less coverage than the cross-town rival. Sports editors know exactly how coaches feel when confronted by parents who believe their “’Hito should be seeing more action, and I know a school board member who agrees.”
    It’s the not-being-fair syndrome that some fans and readers employ.
    Raising three boys, I soon became aware that deprivation, in the form of not lending out the family car, for example, or of forcing them to pay their way for movies or meals or out-of-town trips — all of these are understandable, and Papa-Dad can be forgiven. However, if you extend a privilege or grant a favor to one but not the other — well, that’s simply parental high treason.
    So, with that disclaimer, I refer to the survey Optic contributor Richard Tripp concocted in which he asked readers to submit names of best-ever teams to have won (or almost won) championships.
    Understandably, Dons basketball and Cardinal wrestling and football got nominated often.
    I asked Richard whether there had been any nominations of the Immaculate Conception Colts, a team from a local parochial school that closed down in stages in the ‘60s. Richard said there had not been a single such nomination.
    I was the sports editor in the late ‘50s, but that was several years after the only team with a prayer to win it all had already graduated.
    Yet, any apparent over-coverage for any high school team in Las Vegas precipitated angry calls and letters from representatives of the other schools, complaining, “When our team wins, you bury the story in Section D, Page A-91, but when the other teams win, you practically publish a special edition and splash it all over Page 1.”
    But back to the lack of I.C. input Richard Tripp experienced:
    Few people realize that northern New Mexico was dotted with parochial schools around I.C.’s glory days, in 1953-54, the year in which I.C.
    should have won it all. At the time, I.C. competed against teams like Taos Central Catholic, St. Gertrude’s of Mora and a couple of Catholic schools in southern Colorado.
    A number of public schools — notably Wagon Mound, Maxwell, Farley and Des Moines — possessed enough bodies to field teams in what was then the “B” or smaller of two athletic conferences in the state. Winning state meant competing against more districts and bigger brackets than today, with five classifications, from single-A to quintuple-A.
    In March 1954, no Colt fans went home dry-eyed after an upset that knocked out their team from advancement. Under Nick DiDomenico, the Colts had enjoyed a phenomenal season, winning all their games, except two, splitting with Maxwell and losing a single game to McCurdy Mission. Any team with Leland Abreu and George Fram is bound to win some, and as a result, I.C. drew the top seed in a large district tournament, held at what used to be Stu Clark Gym.
    The team included Abreu and Fram, Pino brothers Mariano and Ray, Amado Ortega, Alfonso Barbero, Artie Geoffrion, Robert Montoya, Eloy Gonzales, Feliciano Armijo and Prudencio Martinez. That year the Colts even beat the Las Vegas High School Cardinals 51-49 in overtime.
    Every fan of the Colts just knew I.C. would capture state that year.
    But what they’d not counted on was the presence of a giant at the time, Tony Reales, who played center for Maxwell. At six-foot-six, Reales was able to scoop up errant shots, toss them back in, and if he missed, try again until he succeeded. By today’s standards, 78 inches of center is no big deal, but in 1954, Reales made even Abreu seem like a shorty.
    By comparison, Leland’s son Art, who coached at Robertson High School several years back, said that at 6-1, his father would have been shorter than Art’s entire Cardinal starting lineup that year.
    A stunned I.C. squad, which had already notched 20 victories, slinked off the court, losers, 47-46. And they had to be content with an anti-climactic victory over the Springer Red Devils, as the consolation prize. I.C. had beaten the Wagon Mound Trojans twice during the regular season and Maxwell once.
    And how many times has this ever happened? How many times have the winner and runnerup met two more times, all the way to the state finals? And how many times has the total winning margin been only five points?
    During regionals and state, the Trojans and Bears kicked aside formidable “B” conference teams from the perennially strong southern part of the state, as well as some eastern New Mexico quintets.
    Wagon Mound beat the Bears 46-44 in the district finals and took one- and two-point victories over Maxwell in regionals and state.
    The state championship that eluded I.C. didn’t make it to Richard’s Tripp’s Wall of Acclaim, but if there were a category for “close, but no cigar,” the Colts conceivably would have made the list.
    Maxwell, with Reales’ help, tripped the Colts right at the starting line, while the Colts obviously were looking beyond the Bears and setting their sights on something bigger, like a date for the state finals at Albuquerque’s Tingley Coliseum.