By MONTE DUTTON

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – A lot goes on at a college basketball tournament. This one in the Big South Conference is just getting started. The games on Wednesday matched the worst teams: eighth-best versus ninth. Winning it from here is similar to plowing a field that happens to be Nebraska.

It’s worth a shot, though.

Once lived there a fellow named William G. Brownlow. He was a Tennessean, a politician and a newspaper man. During the Civil War, Brownlow wrote, “We intend to fight the secessionists until hell freezes over, and then fight them on the ice.”

That was a long shot, too.

There is no truth to the vicious rumor that I drove up here bright and early to see the worst basketball team in America play one more game.

It’s ridiculous. The Presbyterian College women are demonstrably better than Warren Wilson, Erskine and Gardner-Webb (once). Put the Blue Hose on the court 30 times, and they’ll win three. A minute, 9 seconds in, PC led 2-0 against USC Upstate, a 12-19 dynamo by comparison. It took the Spartans another 55 seconds to take the lead. The Blue Hose even won the third quarter by a point. Only the second quarter was bad. It was very bad.

If one doesn’t believe in the occasional moral victory, he (or she) is going to experience sorrow and loss. This is even true if he doesn’t. An upset is worth a dozen victories.

Presbyterian College played hard. On the occasion of their 27^th loss, the Blue Hose fought ‘em on the ice. That’s what I saw. It had nobility to it.

The two leading scorers are seniors. They are neither big nor strong.  Ja’Cia Cunningham is from Milwaukee. Aminata Tal is a Saint Louis girl. Saint-Louis, Senegal. It’s north of Dakar and has 254,000 people when the weather’s nice and everyone raises his (or her) hand.

PC called timeout with 47.2 seconds remaining. The Blue Hose missed a three but got fouled.  Cunningham missed two of three tries. She could’ve brought the Hose within single digits. Chrisela Velez tried one more with 11.5 left. Missed. It look as if somebody had some side money on it. No one would make that bet. Scratch-offs pay more, but three of the final four quarters were decided by a point.

Had I skipped the second quarter, I would’ve seen a hell of a game. Had I been a duck with just one webbed foot, I would’ve swum in circles.

The season is over. Tiffany Sardin has endured two rough ones. Few are the seasons that don’t end in defeat.

Tom Landry coached the Dallas Cowboys for 29 seasons. After the first six, his record was 25-53-4.

Sardin is a tall, patient woman with a soft voice.

“I like our team’s fight. We’ve got a resilience that others might not be able to see,” she said. “We represent a great institution. We certainly want to represent it with more wins, but when you’ve had a rough year, little things mean a lot.

“If we weren’t going to win, we wanted it to be a single-digits game. Nobody wanted to go home.”

By the way, why in the name of John Wooden does every form of basketball in Christendom have four quarters while men’s college hoops has two halves? Is there something left upon which everyone can agree? It’s got to happen. Surely there’s a reason, but it can’t possibly make sense. If men played four quarters, TV would have more room for timeouts.

The Gardner-Webb pep band, adroitly repping PC, played a passable rendition of “On, On, PC.” It was more enthusiastic than the rest of Freedom Hall Civic Center. I counted 14 Upstate fans across the way. Someone behind me kept yelling at the refs on Presbyterian’s behalf. I kept looking around but couldn’t find him.

The men’s cellar beater was Gardner-Webb (3-28) versus USC Upstate (13-18). More people attended, but not many. I reckon it’s inevitably just family and friends. A fine, feverish game, though. Neither the Bulldogs nor the Spartans admitted to the other they were bad, so therefore it didn’t look bad.

The teams played hard.  It was more than a final tryout for the transfer portal. Both head coaches insisted that nothing could be further from the truth.

As this tournament moves along, someone big is going to be upset. Tempers will flare.

Gardner-Webb won the men’s game, 65-64. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were good. Eighteen teams gathered here. Eighteen more from the Southern Conference are in Asheville, about an hour’s drive away. As soon as I can, I’m going to observe the other wars of attrition. I’ll be back in Johnson City, and I’ll be back in Asheville.

It gets better and more intense as it runs its course, but I’m finding stories to write.

Late in the men’s game, I thought momentarily it was going to be decided by a drop kick. A player on the right side of the court dribbled inadvertently off his foot, and the ball sailed to a teammate on the other side. A shot and two taps all failed, but Gardner-Webb still pulled the upset. A freshman named Jamias Ferere put the Bulldogs ahead with two free throws, then sealed it by intercepting a cross-court pass in the final five seconds.

Tension will increase, and tempers will rise. At some point, I’m going to have take it all seriously. Sometimes it’s a great game, and sometimes it’s a great story.

Take a look at the stats of the PC game here.

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Most of my books are available at Amazon. Two of my novels, Cowboys Come Home and Lightning in a Bottle, are available in audio versions.