We smoked them. We held leads of more than 20 points in the second half. Six of our players hit for double figures. Pat Rubeksi had 17 points and ten offensive rebounds. Jay O'Shaughnessy kept Rashad Wilson at bay.

Those statistics were nothing next to Asa Palmer's performance. I don't remember how many boards Asa grabbed or how many points he scored. I just remember the dunk--his first ever in a game--and how it brought the house down.

Although he routinely dunked in practice, Asa had tried to dunk twice before in a game and had been unsuccessful. Against Burlington during our sophomore year in a game that I am sure Harvard baseball's Denny Doble remembers, Asa found himself alone under the basket with Belmont desperately trying to make a comeback. Asa tried to dunk but missed, smashing the ball off the back of the rim.

Asa tried to dunk a second time, against Wakefield, early in our junior season. On a turnaround post move, Asa found himself staring right at the basket with no one guarding him. Seeing a rare opportunity, Asa went up for the jam. The ball rattled around the rim for what seemed like an eternity before dropping through the cylinder.

Until Lexington, Asa had never cleanly dunked in a game. With Wenner at a feverish pitch on that day, however, he did it. I can still see Rashad Wilson losing the ball at midcourt and Pat Rubeski picking it up. I can still see Pat turning his head to find Asa--now 6'7"--flying up the court. I can still see Pat unselfishly but knowingly dishing the ball to Asa at the foul line. I can still see Asa taking one more step and then launching himself into the air. Asa sent the ball through the net with a kind of velocity I had never seen before. The backboard shook for five minutes, Wenner shook for the rest of the night.

At that point, I think everyone began to believe that a state championship could be ours. But Casey Arena's 49 points knocked us out in the third round of the state championship.

We had one more year to realize our goal, but we could no longer quest in anonymity. The Boston Globe turned up the heat by picking us first in its poll of all high school basketball teams in Eastern Massachusetts.

We started out rockily. In our first three games, we best Melrose and Lexington but lost to Woburn, which was neither expected nor forgivable. It was a Tuesday night away game, one of those games that it's intrinsically hard to get excited about. We came out flat, letting Woburn mount a 15-3 lead. We battled back valiantly, and even had a chance to win the game. But we didn't.

The rest of the season hummed along, with the exception of a loss at Lexington. We finished with an 18-2 record, co-possession of the Middlesex League title and high tournament hopes. But we had been flat all season.

It took a 31-24 deficit against Arlington in the second round of the state tournament to finally make us come out of our nearly season-long funk. I don't remember us trailing by seven points at any other time that season, besides during the Woburn game.

We pulled through, somehow. When Kevin LaPierre sank a huge three-pointer (he had the habit of making big three-pointers when it really mattered) to tie the game, everyone knew it could still be ours.

After that game, nothing was going to prevent us from a trip to the Worcester Centrum. We had our moments--the Lincoln-Sudbury game for Sectional Championships was particularly nerve-wracking--but we were going all the way. We knocked off a dazed Latin Academy squad. We dispatched Bunny Jefferson and his Burke team at the Boston Garden.

The state championship game was like nothing I had ever experienced in high school basketball. It seemed like the whole town of Belmont made the hour drive to Worcester to cheer us on. Amidst a sea of blue and maroon in the stands, we blew out the pretenders to our throne, Wahconah, and took home to Belmont what we had claimed to be ours years ago.

At the party that night at Mark Mulvey's house, we felt like celebrities. We watched the highlights on the evening news, we beamed as people heaped praise on us and we sang Queen's "We Are The Champions."

I mention all of this because Asa and I had a reunion of sorts on Tuesday night at the Harvard-Dartmouth basketball game. Asa, after spending a year at prep school, is now a freshman and backup center at Dartmouth. I watched the Harvard crowd harass him, I watched him score an athletic fastbreak basket and I watched him grab an offensive rebound.

I talked to him after the game, asking him if he was enjoying Dartmouth and whether he was enjoying playing Dartmouth basketball. He told me that he really loved it.

And for the first time, I felt a pang of nostalgia for my years as a manager of Belmont boys' basketball. All of the memories that I have related washed across me suddenly and a chill went up and down my spine. I had always known that we had a great run those couple of years, but I never realized how important it had all been to me. Standing there with Asa, seeing him in Dartmouth Green and not Belmont Blue and Maroon, the pieces began to fall into place.

Sports are not--or at least it should not be--about winning or championships. Sports, especially high school sports, are about friendships. It would not have mattered if our team had won the state championship that year, because we all became great friends along the way. And friendships last a lifetime. Some team wins the State Championship every year.

Every time I step into Wenner Field House, I remember our team and I remember winning our championship. But long after the banner at Wenner that has all of our names from the team is removed, long after the trophics are removed from the trophy case, long after I forget that we even won a state championship, I will remember the lasting friends I made on that team. I will the remember little moments--Asa's first dunk, for example--that have special significance.

And those little moments are what sports--and life, for that matter--are all about.