All I know is when we win a game, it's a team win. When we lose a game, it's a team loss.

When it comes to sports I'm a real sucker for stories about sportsmanship. It seems to be such a rare thing.

I'm on the board for the local youth tackle football league and the stuff I've seen at games has often forced me to question my faith in humanity.

So when I come across a story about sportsmanship like this one about a Dekalb, Illinois basketball team I can't help but get a little choked up.

The story is really worth reading but here's a summary: Johntell Franklin was one of the star players of the team they were playing was late to the game because he had just left the hospital where his mother had passed away from cervical cancer. Even though he was grieving he still wanted to play in the game, but under the rules his team would be assessed a technical foul if they put him in.

Out of sympathy the DeKalb coach asked the referee let let Franklin play to waive the technical, which the referee refused. The DeKalb coach then asked for a volunteer to shoot the two technical free throw shots. Senior Darius McNeal volunteered.

He went alone to the free throw line, dribbled the ball a couple of times, and looked at the rim.

His first attempt went about two feet, bouncing a couple of times as it rolled toward the end line. The second barely left his hand.

It didn't take long for the Milwaukee players to figure out what was going on.

They stood and turned toward the DeKalb bench and started applauding the gesture of sportsmanship. Soon, so did everybody in the stands.

"I did it for the guy who lost his mom," McNeal told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It was the right thing to do."

THAT'S what team sports should be about.

Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

This front page story in the Big O about an awesome act of sportsmanship this last weekend left me a little choked up--

"At the plate, Tucholsky concentrated on ignoring the wise guys. She took strike one. And then the senior did something she had never done before -- even in batting practice. The career .153 hitter smashed the next pitch over the center field fence for an apparent three-run home run.

The exuberant former high school point guard sprinted to first. As she reached the bag, she looked up to watch the ball clear the fence and missed first base. Six feet past the bag, she stopped abruptly to return and touch it. But something gave in her right knee; she collapsed on the base path.

"I was in a lot of pain," she told The Oregonian on Tuesday. "Our first-base coach was telling me I had to crawl back to first base. 'I can't touch you,' she said, 'or you'll be out. I can't help you.' "

Tucholsky, to the horror of teammates and spectators, crawled through the dirt and the pain back to first.

Western coach Pam Knox rushed onto the field and talked to the umpires near the pitcher's mound. The umpires said Knox could place a substitute runner at first. Tucholsky would be credited with a single and two RBIs, but her home run would be erased.

"The umpires said a player cannot be assisted by their team around the bases," Knox said. "But it is her only home run in four years. She is going to kill me if we sub and take it away. But at same time I was concerned for her. I didn't know what to do. . . .

"That is when Mallory stepped in."

Mallory Holtman is the greatest softball player in Central Washington history. Normally when the conference's all-time home run leader steps up to the plate, Pam Knox and other conference coaches grimace.

But on senior day, the first baseman volunteered a simple, selfless solution to her opponents' dilemma: What if the Central Washington players carried Tucholsky around the bases?

The umpires said nothing in the rule book precluded help from the opposition. Holtman asked her teammate junior shortstop and honors program student Liz Wallace of Florence, Mont., to lend a hand. The teammates walked over and picked up Tucholsky and resumed the home-run walk, pausing at each base to allow Tucholsky to touch the bag with her uninjured leg.

"We started laughing when we touched second base," Holtman said. "I said, 'I wonder what this must look like to other people.' "

Holtman got her answer when they arrived at home plate. She looked up and saw the entire Western Oregon team in tears.

"My whole team was crying," Tucholsky said. "Everybody in the stands was crying. My coach was crying. It touched a lot of people."

People like to quote Vince Lombardi's "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" speech at every opportunity. I've never agreed with that sentiment (neither did Lombardi who insisted he was misquoted.)

These young women at Sunday's softball game exemplified what sports are really about. It's a hell of a lot more than just winning. Among other things it's character. They have it in spades.

I am personally placing a hundred-dollar bounty on the head of Tim McCracken. He's the head coach and chief punk on that Syracuse team.

I've been participating in a running debate on a couple of sites about this video of a controversial play in youth football for the last couple of days and have to say the biggest disappointment is just how many jerks there are that tend to defend the coach's asshattery as teaching the other team a lesson or some other such nonsense.

Parents get their kids involved in team sports for a lot of reasons. Overall I think we hope the kids will continue to value athletics, working as a team and sportsmanship through their lives. All of the good stuff that comes out of team sports. (I know there's a dark side but as well but I'm speaking in the ideal here.)

The only way kids will take those lessons particularly at a young age is if they have fun at the sport in question and don't burn out on it. "Fun" is tough to qualify. I'm sure the players on the team that executed the "wrong ball" play in the video above thought it was just hysterical. The other team - not so much. We could argue the minutiae of rules as to why that play should be allowed until we're blue in the face but I would say that in the bigger picture anything that causes a bunch of kids on a team to want to hang up their helmets for good because they realize adults are asshats should not be allowed.

Kids have fun when things are COMPETITIVE. That doesn't mean politically correct, not keeping score nonsense or any of the things I've been accused of in arguing for sportsmanship and against the attitudes like what led to that play in the last couple of days. "Competitive" means the teams are more or less evenly matched so that the score isn't necessarilly a foregone conclusion.

That's why kids on the playground instinctually pick teams more and less equally matched. That's why youth leagues don't schedule 8th grade teams against 5th grade teams.

Guys like the coach who actually participated in the play if you listen to the audio are jerks. They're ruining youth sports. Their sorry attitude is the same thing that leads to parents losing their temper and all the other things that are taking away from the games these days.

I would really like them to find another hobby besides coaching youth football.