If you win you go on, if you lose you go play basketball.

Caution: Major Spoilers Included!

I saw Friday Night Lights over the weekend and really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun, high energy, funny at times, well acted, and even managed to avoid one huge cliche (more on this later.) It passed one of the big tests for sports movies: I was hyped up and ready to play when I walked out of the theater.

It's more then just a sports movie too, it has a soul. It explores this Texas football culture in a mature way (my friend Colleen thinks they should have done more, but she's a fan of the book - and they never leave your favorite part of the book in the movie...) Seeing all of that was fun, but isn't something that really stuck to me.

The movie does take on one big challenge, and this stuck. Before I saw the movie I was telling a friend what it was about, and the it went something like this:

"It's a high school football movie where you have this town that rotates around football. The team has some struggles then starts doing well, and eventually makes it to the big championship game - where presumably they win in a dramatic fasion. Of course, it is based on a true story, so they could not win. But that would be a harder movie to make."

Then while I'm watching the movie, sure enough, the determined team makes to to the playoffs and starts working their way through the playoffs. We also see shots of the other big name team which looks like they're better then our protagonists. Sure enough, the two teams meet in the final game and the other team is, in fact, better then the stars of the movie. The get creamed in the first half, then have the requisite half-time speach where they talk about 30 minutes for the rest of your lives kind of stuff (thank you Varsity Blues.) With renewed passion they come out in the second half and start mounting a comeback. They make it all the way to the last play of the game, needing just one score to win. They run their play, they're so close, and they - don't make it. At this point I cheered (to myself, it was a quiet cheer.)

I was so proud of the movie for not having them win. It felt totally ok with me. One of my favorite things about sport is that one of the teams has to lose. There really is something on the line. It's a zero-sum game. And similarly, you can bring all the heart and effort in the world, but some times you just run into superior talent - and you lose. But you need to be proud of your effort and work, and the result that you feel you had, not what the scoreboard says. I see this as an important life lesson, and this movie gets that. That's what the halftime speach was about: leaving everything on the field, doing the absolute best you can. And when their absolute best wasn't good enough to win, that was ok. They felt good about what they did, about what they had accomplished.

We have too many movies about the underdog team winning it all to fulfull their dreams. We don't have enough movies about the team that gave it their all, fell short of their goal, but were still proud of what they accomplished. We should have more of them, because that's what happens to most teams. Lots of teams dreamed of winning state in Texas that year, but only one was going to be able to do it. The rest had to feel good about falling short of their dream

The reality is there's always someone better then you out there (unless you're Lance Armstrong) and the true test of character comes when you face them.

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