Tomorrow comes today for high school athletes

With all its euphoria and net-cutting and trophy-hoisting, March Madness is a magical time of year.

If you've been to a fan-packed high school gym during the state basketball tournament -- be it a regional, sectional or super-sectional game -- you've felt it. The excitement is electric, a high-voltage sensation of tingles and chills. With every roar of the crowd, it's as if the place could explode. The decibels rattle your bones, and the bleachers shake underfoot.

No shortage of adrenaline, that's for sure.

These basketball games are moments when time stands still. And they are really just that -- moments. To think a 75-minute game can produce such lasting, lifelong memories for the thousands who are involved is truly amazing.

We always remember the champions. Amid the flood of humanity that rushes the floor to celebrate, cameras flash and the victors are wildly congratulated with hugs and screams and chest bumps and high-fives. Reporters chase down the winning players for heat-of-the-moment interviews.

Meanwhile, the losing team slinks away to the locker room. Barely noticed, they quietly exit to seek solace in silence. Some begin to peel off their jerseys while making that lonely walk, dabbing at tears while avoiding eye contact.

That's how March Madness will end -- or has already ended -- for every team in the state except the four champions in each class that will be crowned next Saturday in Peoria. They will be the lone revelers. For the rest the madness ends in sadness.

And just like that, it's over. For each year's class of seniors, the scoreboard buzzer blares with finality. It closes the curtain on this action-packed, yet brief, chapter of life -- never to be repeated again.

Time will march on. And so will all of those seniors. As a fan, you feel a certain wistfulness that players like Nick Fruendt (Batavia), Mark Adams (Aurora Central) and Tyler Thompson (West Aurora) -- perennial standouts whom we've grown accustomed to seeing -- will perform only in memory now.

Their classmates will step into the spotlight and -- never fear -- we, as fans, will be treated to more great basketball players. Few of them will be as special as the aforementioned three, but those types of players will, indeed, come along -- the same way Fruendt, Adams and Thompson transformed from skinny freshman kids to all-state-caliber players.

At the same time, who could have envisioned the fate that befell Fruendt and Thompson these last two years? When they were sophomores, they were combatants in this area's "Game of the Century" -- the fabled sectional championship game between Batavia and West Aurora with each team carrying a 27-1 record.

Despite the luxury of having those top players return for the next two years, neither team has advanced past regionals since, confirming that nothing is given, even when it's expected.

Not to date myself here, but we older types have learned the hard way what a valuable commodity time is. It passes quickly. And the older we get, the more we realize that four years is a blip on the screen of life, a mere fraction in the big equation.

Those four, fleeting years in high school are like no other. They are irreplaceable, never to be duplicated. And in terms of sports, they represent the final stages of athletic "careers" for about 95 percent of those involved.

There will be future pickup games and perhaps intramural games, but heated rivalries and face-painted cheering sections are all in the past. Conversations will now switch from "I am" to "I was."

And, just like all former high school athletes (yourself included), the older you get, the better you were.

If we could glean some elderly wisdom on today's young crowd, it would be to enjoy the high school sports experience to the max. Because it truly is uniquely special, but ends quickly and abruptly.

Most are appreciative, realizing these are valuable years. But they're often too busy and preoccupied with the transition into young adulthood to fully recognize just how meaningful the high school sports experience really is.

They'll have time to ponder that in coming years through yearbooks and photos and video clips and all things memorabilia. And, inevitably, they'll ask, "How could it go so fast?"