Last week, Beren Academy’s basketball team fought successfully to have its state semifinal rescheduled so it would not conflict with the Jewish Sabbath.
But, alas, the fairytale ending was not to be, with the side going down by four points in the championship game.
Here’s the last few minutes from the game:
But I’m not posting this to be a downer. In fact, as Chris “No relation to Alec” Baldwin writes, there’s much to take away from the game.
Isaac Mirwis emerges from the locker room, expecting to be alone with his own sad thoughts. Instead as he makes his way back across the floor where his oversized heart broke, he’s hit with a wall of cheers.
It’s the Robert M. Beren Academy fans — parents, kids and grandparents, alumni and even a few strangers — saluting the team that accomplished so much even as it lost the state championship game. This scene more than 40 minutes after the final buzzer on Beren’s 46-42 loss to Abilene Christian in the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS) 2A final isn’t picked up by any of the TV cameras that latched onto this remarkable story that grew out of a tiny Orthodox Jewish day school in Houston.
The cameras have packed up and moved on, chasing the next big thing. Beren doesn’t get the storybook ending. It comes up four points short despite one of the most frenetic fourth quarter rallies you’ll ever see. TV doesn’t know what quite to make of this sort of thing. CNN will not need this Saturday night footage after all.
In some ways, it’s an even more perfect ending. For this was never about winning it all. It was about getting the chance to compete.
When someone peddles the script of Mirwis, Zach Yoshor and Isaac Buchine’s run, they’ll be asked to change the ending to something happier. The team that stood up for the Sabbath — and religious tolerance — the one that wouldn’t stop believing even after it was told it would have to forfeit twice cannot get all the way to championship game and then lose, can it?
No one in TV or the movies is ever going to accept this.
But in some ways, it’s an even more perfect ending. For this was never about winning it all. It was about getting the chance to compete.
Read the whole thing.
