You'll pardon the girls on the Dallas Academy varsity basketball team for wondering just who won and who lost in the wake of their 100-0 setback to The Covenant School two weeks ago.
The game's significance could have quickly receded into history, the rout just another in a series of outrageously lopsided outcomes that silently play out every day in every walk of life, like the billionaire broker passing the homeless guy holding out a Styrofoam cup on Wall Street, or like those kids in "Slumdog Millionaire."
But nine days after an event that took place at The Covenant School's gym in North Dallas and was witnessed by a handful of mostly home team parents, who were all for it, the Dallas Morning News drew attention to the brutal final score — and the fact that it was inflicted by a parochial Christian school over a private school for students with learning disorders, including dyslexia and dysgraphia — with a front-page story by sports media commentator Barry Horn.
National and international attention followed. The eight team members from Dallas Academy suddenly found themselves adopted by the national spotlight. The girls were featured on all the morning network TV shows and most of the evening news shows. They met Matt Lauer. They met Erica Hill. Diane Sawyer signed off her broadcast with "Go Bulldogs!"
All the compassion glaringly lacking in the final score came pouring out from an instantly sympathetic nation.
For The Covenant School, this was like getting caught stealing some kid's lunch money and washing his face in the snow — on videotape.
It didn't help that it happened in a country that had just finished singing "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" at the Obama inauguration, after which the new president of compassion banned torture.
Officials at The Covenant could see the tide of human opinion quickly turning into a tsunami — and themselves standing on the shore.
The day after Horn wrote his story, the school quickly apologized for "Victory without honor" and offered to forfeit the win and give it to Dallas Academy, a gesture that missed the point almost as much as running up the 100-zip score in the first place and to date has not been dignified with a response from Dallas Academy.
To make matters worse, or better, depending on where you stand, the coach of The Covenant team, Micah Grimes, was fired when he disagreed with his school's public apology and doggedly insisted his girls "played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy."
Thus Grimes became the first basketball coach in history to get fired for winning by 100.
Grimes' exit speech sparked the age-old debate about honest competition, giving rise to such questions as: If you don't do your best, aren't you cheating yourself and your opponent? Don't you have an obligation to play like you practice? Didn't Dallas Academy have a responsibility to prepare a team that could compete? If winning, and winning margin, don't matter, then why keep score? And why keep scoring records?
A few commentators jumped to the coach's defense. ESPN, for instance, ran a story called "Why the new remorse about winning big?" that hearkened back to the good/bad old days when John Heisman's Georgia Tech football team whipped Cumberland College 222-0 — and they named the most famous trophy in football after the architect.
But it was only a few.
Most reflected the sentiment in the headline that ran in Canada's National Post: "Would Jesus run up the score?"
Meanwhile, the Dallas Academy girls continue to revel in the spoils of defeat.
Weird how one day you can't get the ball over the midcourt line in a 100-0 shutout, and the next you're the most loved team in America.
As CBS's Erica Hill put it: "You may think they're losers, but in fact they're the exact opposite."
Luckily, the girls attend a school with experts on dyslexia who can help them sort all that out.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.