My kingdom for a centrist. Just once, in this era of I’m-right, you’re-wrong, red and blue states and keyboard muscles that would give Barry Bonds’ biceps an inferiority complex, I’d love to hear from a voice of reason.

Politics and religion used to be the verboten territory if you didn’t feel like wallowing waist-deep in the extremity. Now it seems the lost art of moderation will leave you disenfranchised from every element of a splintered, combative society.

Scholastic sports, sadly, included.

Monday makes the one-month milestone of the mass e-mail emanating from Maine Principals’ Association offices in Augusta, effectively calling for a downsizing of high school varsity athletics.

Among an ad hoc committee’s recommendations: Reduce the length of each sports season by one or two games; permit only two non-countable (exhibition) dates per team each season; reduce the tournament pool from 67 to 50 percent of teams; lop a week from the winter sports season; freeze officials’ game fees for two years; and withdraw from the New England interscholastic championships.

Given the reaction from a vociferous few, one might conclude the principals announced September 1, 2009 as the date of Armageddon. The sky is falling! Run to the hills! Shoot first, ask questions later!

Hey, I’m tired of hearing about the economic malaise every time I pick up the newspaper or watch the nightly news, too. In many respects, I am convinced that it’s a self-fulfilling media prophecy. Scare the bejeebers out of me, convince me not to spend money, watch our capitalist way of life collapse. But that doesn’t change the fact that these are desperate times, easily the worst we’ve seen since the endless gas and welfare lines of the 1970s and almost assuredly far north of where they’ll bottom out.

For the MPA to sit on its ink-stained hands and do nothing, ignoring the widening chasm between the two Maines, could be fatal to the future of youth sports in the state.

So the sanctioning body took the only sensible, responsible action in this climate, trimming what the naked eye sees as the fat. Their proposed cuts appear to slice evenly enough so as not to punish fall, winter or spring sports relative to the others. What’s the term our president-elect flaunts with such fondness? Shared sacrifice, however utopian it rings.

If you love sports and the people who play them, naturally you bristled at this proposal. Not one of us aspires to take a pay cut, cycle back to basic cable or turn down our thermostat. It grates against our sense of entitlement and our inherent, self-reliant Yankee abhorrence of change.

I understand the passion and the disappointment, but I don’t get the rancor and anonymous verbal abuse that the, um, athletic supporters have dished out over the last four weeks.

Also, if you’re going to rail on the verge of obscenity against something as simple as words on a memorandum that appear to be open for debate, how about engaging in the fine art of dissent? Of course, that would require sitting down and penning a thoughtful counter-proposal.

The silence on that front has been deafening, in part because it’s an impossible task. You cannot look a teacher or administrator in the eyes and insist without blinking that sports shouldn’t be subject to the same tightening of the purse strings that grip everyone else.

If you concede that point, sit down with your calculator and red pen and try to spin an alternative, your individual bias will seep between the lines. Cross country coaches don’t want to give up regular-season meets any more cheerfully than the heads of hoop wish to surrender holiday tournament games.

It’s the role of the MPA to assess everything impartially and react. Which leads us to another truth that’s being lost in the chorus of Bronx cheers: The MPA is not a cloister of six to eight high-salaried mucks watching from an ivory tower in Augusta. It’s an association of administrators from each corner of the state, all of whom are paid to sweat out the exorbitant costs and demands of public education on a daily basis. Suffice it to say the needs of a principal in St. Agatha are divergent from those of his counterpart in Saco.

Ninety-five percent of the people in those communities, and every other, don’t give a tinker’s damn about your school’s precious athletic program. When is the last time you saw your neighbors Joe and Jane at a high school basketball game? Twenty years ago, when Little Joey and Jessica captained the teams. The typical taxpayer cares about issues that impact him directly.

Unless you have a child with autism or dyslexia, you probably can’t comprehend the amount of money funneled into special education. When your son can’t strum a guitar and your daughter doesn’t warble like a nightingale, you aren’t consumed with concern when artistic allotments get the knife.

The next time an athletic apologist goes public with the objection that sports occupy “only” two to three percent of an educational budget, that sound you’ll hear is a music teacher losing her breakfast.

Is there some pomposity, real or presumed, couched in the MPA’s proposal? Maybe. Some of that might be wrapped up in the public’s perception of the group as aloof, detached and elitist. We see that December declaration as final, binding and not litigable.

I don’t believe any of that. Your athletic director, principal or superintendent is there to receive your ideas, when they’re presented respectfully and when you treat that person as human.

If you don’t like the proposal, do some quick brainstorming. Instead of worrying about how much money MPA executive director Dick Durost makes relative to how much cash this plan will save your school, use your noodle and come up with a more creative, equitable fashion to stop the bleeding.

There is plenty of room for compromise. Possibly there’s a compelling case for line-iteming withdrawal from the New Englands out of these cuts. Four out-of-season basketball dates would be reasonable, since that season is twice as long as football’s. That would allow cash-cow holiday tourneys to survive. And Lord knows someone needs to reorganize the oversized, far-flung conferences in this state so Georges Valley isn’t making six-hour round trips to play Mt. Abram.

Somebody’s astute enough to regionalize the schedule, revamp the Heal Point system and allow Class A Cony to play neighboring Class C Winthrop without getting penalized at tournament time. That person will save schools in our you-can’t-get-there-from-here state a million bucks in his or her lifetime, guaranteed.

Hard work and hard decisions are afoot in these hard times. High school sports face hard questions.

No, the MPA doesn’t hold a monopoly on hard answers. But you and I bloody sure don’t, either.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].