The year 2004 is ending in a flurry of improbable outcomes.

In Ukraine, voters have a controversial election between two Viktors (the irony is sweeter than figgie pudding), and yet nearly two months after Washington state’s gubernatorial race we’re having a dickens of a time coming up with one.

But for raw dramatics, you can’t beat this week’s Shadle Park-Mead high school basketball game in which, with less than a second on the clock, ninth-grader Zack Humphrey hurled a desperation shot three-quarters of the length of the court – swish – to break a 40-40 tie and give Shadle Park a miracle win.

The nice thing – the honest thing – about sports is that while Humphrey’s shot will go down as the indisputable game-winner, nobody will come away from that game saying, “See, it just goes to prove that every point matters.”

Of course every point matters. Every point always matters.

Athletes, being athletes, are competitive. They go onto the court or the field to do what they’re trained to do, which is to apply their skills, perform their respective roles and put more points on the scoreboard than the other guys.

Even in a one-sided game, every point matters because they tell us something more than just who won and who lost. They tell us about relative quality, both of individual players and of teams.

Sportsmanship demands a certain self-restraint in the final minutes of lopsided contests, but as a rule athletes go into a game to do their best, and the excitement of a game-winning buzzer-beater is possible only because of the collective effort that led up to it.

Like a sporting event, an election is a matter of aggregation. Already people are going around saying that the unprecedented tightness of Washington state’s gubernatorial race proves that every vote matters. As if that wouldn’t necessarily be so if either Dino Rossi or Christine Gregoire had trounced the other.

Actually, if that’s your framework – that the election’s only significance is to identify the winner – then rarely does every vote count. If the next governor enters office on the strength of, say, 10 votes, then nine of them would be superfluous. And for that matter, none of the votes cast for the loser would have mattered at all.

But there’s more to it than that.

The results of an election ought to represent the collective voice of the public. It speaks with not only a message but also a tone. A decisive outcome proclaims a mandate. A neck-and-neck contest such as the Rossi-Gregoire race reveals political division.

Wonks who analyze the results down to the precinct level tell us which subsets of the population are influential and which are neglected. Pollsters who track the priorities of the electorate report back on which issues society deems most urgent.

In a society that operates on democratic principles, those nuances are important.

Unfortunately, however, we’re moving away from that expression of community. For the convenience of government, we are pushing greater reliance on voting by mail. Instead of joining with our neighbors to go to the polls, more and more of us are voting in our kitchens and our mailboxes. It’s cheaper than hiring poll workers and it produces the appearance of a healthy democracy as embodied in higher turnouts.

The downside, as historian and sociologist Michael Schudson put it, is to individualize and privatize what should be a collective ritual, “draining away the last social and public elements of voting that the polling place preserves.”

Zack Humphrey will probably never hit another 80-foot shot in the final second of a tie game, and there’s not likely to be another political contest in as much of a statistical dead heat as the one for governor of Washington in 2004. But it’s a disservice to the voters and to the concept of self-governance to argue that voting’s importance depends on the closeness of the election.