AUGUSTA — It’s only a game, right?

We, meaning you and I and our neighbors by the tens of thousands, celebrate this high school basketball tournament each February with blogs and bluster, hope and hype, cheers and tears, all with good, old-fashioned American excess.

Somewhere amid the lunacy, the hand-wringers and killjoys among us preach that there’s nothing life-and-death about these nine magical days, that it’s a superficial scintilla of the educational process.

They’re only half-correct.

Ten teenagers from Arthur R. Gould High School in South Portland walked into Augusta Civic Center on Saturday morning without a band, without official cheerleaders and without freedom.

It was hard to miss the juxtaposition of A.R. Gould getting paired in the Western Class D quarterfinals with Greenville, a traditional community school situated along the serene shores of Moosehead Lake.

Beaten by a baker’s dozen, the Lakers will return to their snowmobiles and their ice fishing shacks next week. It was no different than a torch being extinguished at a “Survivor” tribal council. Greenville merely lost its tournament life.

No stretch to suggest that one, maybe two A.R. Gould athletes, perhaps all of them, are playing for their actual lives.

Don’t think so? Probably you weren’t watching the news Thursday night, headlined by the dreadful details of a man gunned down across the street from Portland Expo, site of the Western Class A and B tournaments. The A.R. Gould roster is replete with mere children, some of them 15 and 16 years old, who have wandered too closely to that lifestyle.

A.R. Gould is a reform school located within the Long Creek youth development center. Classes are taught and games played behind locked gates. Even the leeway to participate in this tournament required special dispensation from Gov. John Baldacci.

Thank goodness for that. Our loss and history’s loss would have been drowned tomorrow in a sea of agate type and red tape. Cost to the kids: Unknown and unquantifiable for years, but unquestionably real.

“There’s no attitude. I just don’t get any attitude from these guys,” said A.R. Gould coach Tom Profenno. “Whatever brought them to the youth center to begin with, I don’t see that on the court.”

Indeed, only two things were visible to the naked eye Saturday. One, A.R. Gould behaved with the decency and class notably lacking in half our public school student-athletes these days. And two, Ian Nono played the greatest individual game in the history of this arena.

Ever. Class, gender and era irrelevant.

Nono, a 6-foot-1 forward whose fingertips seemed to elevate two feet above the rim every time he drove to the hoop or flirted with a rebound, erupted for 45 points, the most by a male high school player in the building’s history.

More than Jim Bigelow, the Valley player who set the previous Class D mark 19 years ago. More than Andy Bedard, T.J. Caouette, Raymond Alley, Francois Bouchard or anyone else once larger-than-life in this state unspoiled by the pros.

Easy to miss his 16 rebounds, seven steals and six blocked shots in the looming shadow of three reverberating dunks. Or to overlook the fact that he could have dropped 50, maybe 60, if he weren’t unselfish to a fault.

Yes, that’s right. Confined to an environment where too many boys and men surface because they grew up without role models, Nono, formerly a double-digit scorer at Deering High School, is evolving into a leader himself.

A.R. Gould players weren’t permitted to speak with the media Saturday. No problem. Everyone in a perceptibly, perhaps understandably suspicious arena heard Nono’s message at full volume.

“When I tell him to do something, I know it’s going to get to the whole team,” Profenno said. “Sometimes he asks me if it’s OK to shoot. I tell him as long as it’s within what we do offensively, I’m not going to treat him any differently if it doesn’t go in than when it does.”

Of course, now the grumbling begins. 

We hear it every year about Hyde and Elan schools, because they usually win a game or two at the expense of public opponents. The drumbeat grows more thunderous as the team advances from one Saturday to the next. Louder, still, when it’s the soundtrack for an institution such as Elan or A.R. Gould whose students arrive with social baggage.

It’d be comical if it didn’t smack of parochialism at best, racism at worst.

Nono and Lewiston native George Hopkins are the only Bears to have played organized high school hoop before their confinement. And Hopkins was a freshman and junior varsity player in his one year with the hometown Blue Devils.

“He gets his momentum from the other kids,” Profenno said of Hopkins. “But as the season’s gone on, he’s been more and more under control.”

Always thought that’s what this was about: Life lessons.

Or is that lip service and ear candy? Or are we only interested in conveying those lessons to children who look like us, or who grew up next to us, or fit into the pretty little boxes we’ve constructed for them?

It sure is only a game. It’s called life. And if the satisfaction of Saturday’s trifling victory on this 84-foot court is what ultimately keeps A.R. Gould’s young men from ever walking into another one with stone walls and a stodgy judge, we all win.

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