You Can’t Win ‘em All
Published: March 3rd, 2015
By: Patrick Newell

Tom Collier spent a good portion of his Sunday on the phone. When he left the house for routine errands, he was often stopped by faithful Norwich basketball patrons.

One of the first questions Collier had to answer in every conversation was, "what happened?"

Those who regularly read our sports page know that Collier's charges fell in the Section IV boys' basketball playoffs this past Saturday night to Chenango Valley, 65-62.

This reporter wasn't at Norwich High School. Instead, I was covering the state championship victories of NHS senior wrestlers Frankie Garcia and Tristan Rifanburg at the Times Union Arena in Albany. I followed the game updates on Twitter, and just a moment before I posted a Twitter update of Garcia winning his second state title, my Twitter feed displayed a Chenango Valley 65-62 win over Norwich.

I wasn't completely shocked, although the result was a case of history repeating itself. The last Norwich home playoff game I missed was in February, 2011, and Norwich lost that game to Johnson City. Again, I was covering the state wrestling tournament, and again, Tristan Rifanburg was center stage.

Earlier this year I dug out a statistic and mentioned it to Collier. News traveled fast as that statistic was recited by a number of people back to the source – me. Until its loss at Oneonta last month, Norwich had won 44 straight games against Section IV Class B teams.

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