AUGUSTA – This sportswriting thing’s a dangerous game, and I’m not talking about the horrors of a five-alarm farmer’s tan and writer’s cramp.

When you’re assigned to follow any team at any level to the championship round, you are prodded, goaded, expected, even morally obligated to put a prediction in print.

Eight, maybe nine times out of ten, your prescience wins friends and begrudging admirers. Your expertise is immortalized in microfilm. You are a genius, even if your forecast took the intellectual courage of predicting that Wal-Mart will turn a profit this year.

And then there’s that once-every-leap-year occasion where you wind up looking like a bigger yahoo than the buffoon who blustered, “God, Himself, could not sink this ship.”

That’s why I’m thankful that God, Himself, intervened in the Class A baseball playoffs, sending Maine a week-long plague of precipitation that forced Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School to win the regional and state championships in a 24-hour window.

Otherwise, with a day or two or three to collect my thoughts and time to publish them, I would have submitted a proud piece of prose previewing the Class A title game. It would have been thoroughly researched. It would have been buttressed with statistics and quantitative analysis.

It also would have been egregiously wrong.

Just so you’ll never be able to accuse me of cheating the reader, though, here, in the interest of fun and fairness and my fondness for abuse, are selected excerpts from the column you never got to see. The parenthetical paragraphs offer a little magical hindsight.

Enjoy the cackling, derision and name-calling at my expense

They’re calling this a state championship game? Ha! That’s like inviting your kid and his beginner six-string to a Battle of the Bands and then announcing that his opponent is The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Maine high school hockey, lacrosse and football don’t need realignment, not until we do something about baseball. I mean, seriously, must we punctuate every season by watching any of four worthy Southern Maine Activities Association teams make the “lucky” Eastern Maine champion look like the Mudville Nine?

(OK, so Oxford Hills clearly doesn’t need to live within a 15-minute radius of Frozen Ropes, the year-round training center that might as well be in every Westbrook player’s basement. The Vikings don’t need to raise $10,000 to make a March team trip to City of Palms or Myrtle Beach or even Cape Cod. “We can hit anybody’s pitching. We hit the ball all season,” said senior shortstop Kyle Keniston. “We weren’t going to stop today.”)

Hello, Westbrook had six days off. Six days! Anyone who toed the rubber for the Blue Blazes in the regional tournament is eligible to pitch until kingdom come. Oxford Hills, meanwhile, burned up its No. 1 and No. 2 hurlers by winning a 13-8 arms race with Edward Little on Monday night.

Third wheel Chris Jennings dislocated the middle finger on his pitching hand during that game. Two freshmen are waiting in the wings in the likely event that Jennings can’t start, much less finish. Shane Slicer and the Vikings’ coaching staff have commissioned a private investigator to find out if one of the post-grads on the American Legion team has any schoolboy eligibility remaining.

(Jennings threw some off-speed stuff that was so “off,” so nasty, I swear some of Westbrook’s strapping, heart-of-the-order guys swung twice. Tim Wakefield pitching with a two-inch-thick layer of petroleum jelly under the brim of his cap couldn’t have rendered the opposition so helpless. Jennings was superb. He was a surgeon. He made conventional wisdom sound like Paris Hilton trying to explain the federal tax code. “We heard all the hoopla about their bats,” said Slicer. “Chris is the best competitor we had left.”)

Nice season the Vikings enjoyed in the JVAC, um, I mean the KVAC, but isn’t it a shame they get to follow the delirium of dispatching Edward Little with the despondency of being demolished by Westbrook?

No offense to anyone north of Exit 48, but this is reminiscent of the run when the 49ers, Redskins, Giants and Cowboys took turns winning the Super Bowl for about two decades. Nobody’s stayed within five runs of the SMAA champion since Bangor won the final in 1997. Westbrook simply drew the big straw. Put Portland or Deering in this game and they’d be laughing all the way to the merciful, five-inning finish, too.

(Westbrook didn’t play like a team that knew it was supposed to win this game. And Oxford Hills bore no resemblance to a team ecstatic just to be here. They put almost every ball in play. They forced mistakes. They didn’t start sniffling or sniveling over their own miscues. “(Matt) McDonnell and I were hanging out in the pool this morning, talking about how this is the last thing we’re ever going to do as high school students,” said Keniston. “We said, Everybody else is all done. We might as well go win it.'”)

The mercy rule sends everyone home by supper time. Westbrook wins by a dozen. Anything else would be as ludicrous as suggesting that a franchise other than the Red Sox or Yankees will be leading the American League East on the first day of summer.

(Yeah, we ink-stained buffoons screwed that one up, too. Baseball defies logic. What Oxford Hills accomplished Tuesday evening at Morton Field defied description. The rural region represented by those white, green and gold uniforms has the right to be proud. And the right to tell a certain columnist that he couldn’t handicap his way out of a wet paper bag. Congratulations to all.)

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