Steve Christilaw: We should celebrate the Central Valley girls basketball team

The greatest of sports streaks always have an end point.

It’s funny, but it is difficult to put a streak into any kind of perspective while it’s ongoing.

When a streak is underway, our attention trends toward when the end will come rather than how incredible the streak is. It’s the same with both winning and losing streaks.

Just as a Cleveland Browns fan. Or a Seattle Mariners fan waiting for the day the team finally gets back to the postseason.

When it all comes down to rock bottom, the only difference is the level of despair felt by the loyal following.

Streaks have to end before we truly begin to recognize just how impressive it really was.

One of the more delicious pieces of trivia I have ever read was that Joe DiMaggio missed out on a nice chunk of change, $10,000, when his famous hitting streak ended at 56 games. If it had gone just one game longer, Heinz had an offer on the table for an endorsement deal.

What for, you ask?

Heinz 57 Sauce.

One of my favorite streaks belonged to Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse of the New York Yankees – an odd statement from someone with an extreme dislike for anything in baseball wearing pinstripes.

In the interest of full disclosure, Gehrig and I share the same birthday, which has something to do with my reverence for his streak of consecutive games played. It also may have something to do with the movie “Pride of the Yankees.”

Gehrig’s streak started when Wally Pipp asked for a day off as the Yankees’ first baseman, and Gehrig didn’t come out of the lineup for 2,130 consecutive games. Over the course of that streak, he played with broken bones in his hands, an assortment of pains, strains and sprains, and at the end, the undiagnosed beginnings of an insidious disease that, to this day, bears his name: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease.

It was with a touch of sadness that I watched Cal Ripken break that streak, but I do admire his durability over his 2,632 consecutive games played for the Baltimore Orioles.

Wayne Gretzky went a remarkable 51 straight NHL games scoring a point – a goal or an assist.

Chicago goaltender Glenn Hall started every game the Blackhawks played for more than eight seasons, a streak of 502 consecutive games.

The University of San Francisco owns a 60-game win streak that included two national championships (in 1955 and ’56). A couple interesting facts about that streak – when coach Phil Woolpert became the head coach in 1950, the Dons didn’t have their own gym and practiced at a local high school. What they did have for the first 55 of those wins was a couple guys who went on to play for the Boston Celtics: Bill Russell and K.C. Jones.

That pair, by the way, helped the Celtics win eight straight NBA titles.

UCLA men’s basketball is no stranger to streaks.

John Wooden’s Bruins had a 47-game win streak while they had a center there named Lew Alcindor (if that name is unfamiliar, and to readers of a certain age that is a distinct possibility, he changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

But that comes up short to Wooden’s longest streak: 88 straight wins with a guy named Bill Walton playing in the middle. That streak ended in dramatic fashion when Digger Phelps’ Notre Dame Fighting Irish went on a 12-0 run to pull out a 71-70 victory.

Connecticut’s women put together a 70-game win streak from 2001-03. The Huskies also have a 90-game win streak from 2008-2011.

And to put a capstone on the whole streak thing, they also own a 111-game win streak from 2014-17. You might remember how that streak ended: Mississippi State hit a dramatic last-second shot to take a 66-64 win in the 2017 NCAA Women’s Tournament semifinals.

UConn is an appropriate example when it comes to appreciating what Central Valley has accomplished over the past four seasons.

This year’s senior class on the girls basketball team has had a pretty incredible run – one that coincided with last year’s senior class.

Lacie and Lexie Hull and Hailey Christopher, who graduated last year and now play Division I college basketball, and this year’s seniors Mady Simmelink and Camryn Skaife grew up playing basketball together. They played plenty of club basketball as a group before they ever reached the CV gym. And they played like it.

It’s not a coincidence that once they all got together on the varsity the Bears were undefeated and marched to a state championship in 2016. In fact, they rolled to 52 straight wins before being derailed on their way to back-to-back state titles in the ’17 state quarterfinals.

They made up for lost ground last year with a second state title in three years and capped it all off with a win in a national invitational championship tourney.

Without last year’s seniors, CV still managed to win a fourth straight Greater Spokane League title this season, going 20-3 overall and 13-1 in league. But the Bears lost to Lewis and Clark – which dealt CV its only regular season league loss – in their bid for a fifth straight district championship.

That is not a knock on a fantastic season. To lose three players who are not only on college basketball rosters but contributing to their various programs is a loss that would knock most programs down at least one tier.

On top of all that, Freddie Rehkow – the national girls basketball coach of the year for 2018 – retired, leaving another void to fill.

Defending state champion Central Valley, ranked No. 4 in the state at Class 4A, faces No. 5 Glacier Peak on Saturday at 2 p.m. in the regional round at state. The winner advances to play a state quarterfinal game next Thursday at the Tacoma Dome, while the loser faces a first-round loser-out game on Wednesday.

Glacier Peak lost to Woodinville in the first Wes-King bi-district championship game, snapping a 19-game win streak of it sown.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a team is to free them from the outside pressure of a streak and allow them to stand on their own.

Since both teams are looking to bounce back from a streak-breaking loss, Saturday’s game at University HS should be a barnburner of a high school basketball game.

Playing as close to home as you can get in a playoff game, I would never look past the defending state champs when it comes to their streak of five straight state tournaments.

Some streaks are just plain hard to snap.