It’s never too late to honor these athletes

There are very few things that really scare me.

Spiders. Unexpected loud noises. Spiders on the ceiling. Large men with multiple tattoos. Spiders in the bathtub. Flashing lights in the rearview mirror. Spider webs behind the fertilizer in the garage. Large women with multiple tattoos. Spider-like shadows.

Senior Night.

Why would a night meant to honor high school senior athletes strike terror in my heart, terror matched only by seeing one of those huge wolf spiders prancing across the basement floor?

Like a Wes Craven movie, there are levels to this fear.

The easiest to understand is the professional one.

The only thing high school sports writers really root for, as a group, is a quick game.

When it comes to football, we all love running teams. To paraphrase the late Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes, when you throw the ball bad things happen, like the clock stopping.

So senior nights have always resided on the naughty list.

They have a tendency to run long, especially when the senior class is larger than the cast of “Rome.”

But, in the course of doing this job for the past few years, my feelings have changed.

If a senior night causes a game to finish 20 minutes late, so be it, even if you may have to sit through six of them at the end of basketball season.

Maybe my attitude change occurred around the time the oldest kid became a senior and I realized, as a baseball-only kid, he wasn’t going to have a senior night – or day for that matter.

I’ve come to see senior nights as a way to honor the athletes and the people who support them.

For the stars, it’s one last chance for the home crowd to acknowledge their success. To acknowledge all they’ve done to bring glory into the halls of good ol’ Spokane High. And for the athlete to bathe in that acknowledgement one last time.

For the others, the great majority of high school athletes, it is their one chance for acknowledgement, to hear the cheers often showered upon others. It’s a chance for the kids who support their teammates from the bench to be acknowledged with a start.

All the sweat, all the time, all the effort of four years rolled into one night that, at its essence, is a goodbye.

Add it up and it has given me a reluctant appreciation of the value of such nights.

So the personal foreboding is more palatable right now.

My wife and I will be going through this for the first time Friday night.

I’m afraid I’m going to snivel like some little snot afraid of spiders or something.

It’s OK if mom cries. That’s expected. Pass the tissues, offer a shoulder, hold her coat, act sympathetically. All of that’s in the script.

But if I look down the line and see some big old ex-All Pac-10 defensive lineman tearing up, or some ex-Vandals tight end start blubbering, I’m going to lose it.

I’ve seen enough of these things to know the drill.

The kid’s going to be introduced, he’ll bring his mom a flower and his dad the antenna from the truck he destroyed. He’ll tell us how much he appreciates what we did for him, we’ll tell him how we love him and mom will start to bawl.

But I think I’ll be OK.

Unless a spider runs across the field.