The cause for women's rights celebrates a triumph, then suffers a defeat in just two days.

A decade ago, these young all-star selections were evidence of the success of Title IX.

I will not lie to you. There are times when I look at the direction in which this country is headed, and I fear for its future.

That vantage point was attained even though I am still one of the most protected members of our society -- an aging, white, heterosexual male, one that has enjoyed far more privilege over my 68 years on this earth to the point where I not only didn't understand or fully appreciate what I had, but I also have no idea how to spend what's left in my remaining days. 

Outside of the norms of society, no one has ever told me what I can do with my own body. I can eat, sleep, work, play, fornicate or defecate whenever and wherever I want, save for instances where some of those actions would be totally inappropriate in a social setting. The only time I was told I couldn't play sports was when it was proven that I was not good enough at them to satisfy the requirements of the meritocracy that is competitive athletics. And outside of the legalities surrounding mingling with the opposite sex, there are no laws applicable to my participation in mutually-agreed-upon activities that might result in reproduction.

Yet here we are in the fourth week of June, the Year of Our Lord 2022, and in the past two days, it has been driven home to me just how badly women have it in these United States of America.

Thursday should have been, and hopefully was, a reminder of one of the great moments of triumph for American women. It was the 50th anniversary of the addition of just 37 words to the Education Amendments of 1972 -- a passage called Title IX that opened the doors to millions of women to receive equal access to opportunities in athletics in colleges and high schools.

"No person in the United States," they read, "shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Title IX opened the door, all right. Several states, including Massachusetts, followed up with their own statutes underscoring those provisions where state funding was concerned. And the changes those acts wrought were truly culture-changing.

In 1971, the year of my graduation from Mansfield High School, Title IX did not exist. Sports for boys were numerous and coaches had experience in their disciplines. But that was not the case for girls. For the most part, schools offered field hockey, basketball, softball and tennis, and that was it.

Just a year earlier, in fact, Massachusetts changed over from the peculiar six-girl basketball rules that allowed only three players to cross center court, restricted players to just one dribble and a pass, and let the center stand all day in the lane without penalty. At Mansfield High, the long-time female physical education teacher that coached all sports turned over the reins of the girls' basketball team to a young English teacher whose best qualification for the job was that she was single and available for after-school duties.

Jackie Cross, left, plays in a boys-girls exhibition
game at Mansfield High in 1971.

My high school sweetheart, Jacqueline Cross, was the center of that team. She was 5-foot-11, slender but athletic, who had received very little true coaching in the nuances of any kind of basketball, let alone the game that she and her teammates were forced to learn once "boys' rules" were in place.

Despite all that, she loved to play. She certainly drew more than her share of three-second violations during the transition from one set of rules to another, but she adapted and did her best. In hindsight, I look back at her and try to envision what kind of a player she would have been with today's quality of coaching, today's training equipment and the nurturing atmosphere that Title IX brought to women's sports, and I think she would have been a good one -- and that is said with the full knowledge that in my 40-plus years with the local newspaper, I saw a lot of very good players, many going on to excel in college, including one that was one of the best in the nation during her career.

Title IX made that possible. It was a slow start and change didn't happen overnight. Girls didn't start wearing actual basketball uniforms instead of baggy jumpsuits until the mid-'70s. Coaching hires and practice availability didn't improve immediately. Some schools, including Attleboro High, relegated girls' basketball to a small side gymnasium instead of where the boys played. Even Boston College didn't grant its women's team regular access to the Conte Forum on a regular basis until the late 1990s, instead forcing the women to play in an adjacent practice gym.

For most of our local girls, their teams played in the afternoons, before small crowds, while the boys played at night and got all the fanfare. In my role as a high school sports reporter for the weekly Mansfield News, I had to choose between the two because of travel, and the paper wanted only the boys' games covered, so it was that on an afternoon of shooting baskets outside her house, Jackie asked me why I never came to watch her games.

My response: "It's only girls' basketball."

Worst statement I ever made in my life. 

I will never forget the hurt and disappointment in her eyes. And yet it still took about seven or eight more years, in my early years at The Sun Chronicle, for pressure from local coaches to work its way through my thick skull and prompt me to start directing the sports department to provide better coverage for all girls' sports.

It was tough at first. People resisted the change. A lot of male sports fans thought we were taking something away from the coverage of their sports, when in truth we were adding more pages and more column inches of coverage. There was even some reluctance among the management of the paper to devote more resources to covering girls' sports or giving them equal play. And of course, there were the peculiar knuckle-draggers that found the need to personally insult me, accusing me of deviant behavior and attacking my reputation, just because I covered girls' sports and actually enjoyed them.

Former Feehan star Katie Nelson.

But as the saying goes, we persevered. The Sun Chronicle became a better newspaper because of it. And today, while the coverage of women's pro sports is still a distant second fiddle to the men's pro leagues, there isn't a newspaper (among those that remain, that is) that would not offer equal coverage to boys and girls at the high school level.

Consistent to that theme of being ahead of the curve, I wrote my tributes to Title IX 10 years ago, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the legislation. Several stories ran over a four-day period, highlighting the progress made by athletes I interviewed, who ranged in age from 16 to 74. Fortunately, all of those I interviewed are still with us and have witnessed further progress -- although there are still a few instances when I'm irritated that a school hasn't opened all of its bleachers for the girls' game even though Title IX mandates equal access to facilities.

Some glaciers move (or melt) more slowly than others.

In general, Title IX has been a positive thing for America as a whole -- and it's hard to believe that it was signed into law by one of the worst presidents this nation ever had, Richard M. Nixon. Paranoid and vindictive as he was, Nixon was not a stupid man. He respected the rights of all Americans (if not the Constitution that gave him his authority), and thus his signature on the Education Amendments of 1972 may actually represent one of the few high points of his morally corrupt administration.

So, Thursday should have been a day of celebration. That changed abruptly with the cowardly news dump on Friday that the Supreme Court of the United States had voted 6-3 to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion by a 7-2 vote in 1973. We all knew it was coming following that celebrated leak of the draft version of the opinion, but it became official just in time for all of the justices to hotfoot it out of town for what I expect will be a very long hiatus.

I will not get into a theological or moral debate over abortion. I do not consider myself qualified in the slightest to establish the moment when life begins in the womb, or when a fetus would be viable to survive outside it. I don't have the credentials to say the exact moment when a soul enters the vessel, or if there is even such a thing. I tend to subscribe to the theories that mankind has always created "gods" to explain away what they didn't understand.

All I know is that women do not have the same rights as men in a country where it was proclaimed in a document of some note that "all men (and that really should be amended to include women) are created equal."

The Constitution, as written three centuries ago, reflects the society of the times. Men ruled the roost, and they were all one color. Black men and women brought over from Africa could still be sold as slaves. And all women had just one purpose -- to make babies.

Slavery wasn't ended until 1865. Women got the right to vote in 1920. Yet in both instances, vestiges of old prejudices remain and they continue to divide our country. We could have elected a woman president in 2016, and more people voted for her than the ignoramus that won in the Electoral College, but that glass ceiling remains unshattered.

Concentrating solely upon women's issues, because that's what's in the news today, women still don't make the same as men in comparable jobs. Fewer opportunities are presented to them, and workplace harassment continues to be an omnipresent issue facing those that endure it.

As I said at the top of this missive, no one would dare pass legislation that would so severely restrict a man's control over his own body, particularly his reproductive organs -- although I've suggested many times that the Second Amendment remains in place to compensate some men for what they didn't get at birth. In a nutshell: Big gun? Small penis.

Reaction to Friday's ruling was swift.

I can just imagine the howls of protest that would hail from old white men of Republican leaning if Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and other female legislators (hell, let's throw Hillary Clinton in there just to torment the right wing even further) banded together to pass legislation to restrict the number of ejaculations a man could have, or the number of times he could legally have sex, the number of potential partners he could have, and the number of children he could father. Or maybe the Christian right could convince legislators that every ejaculation is an exercise in murdering potential children because from among the millions of sperm that get the chance, only one is needed to fertilize an egg. Oh, the potential humanity!

Yes, it's nonsense. But so is the premise argued by Justice Clarence Thomas that the SCOTUS should review other past decisions that cover contraception or same-sex marriages. I note that he did not include decisions that legalized interracial marriage (as he is a participant in one), but let's face it -- there are a whole lot of ignorant rednecks in certain parts of this country that still haven't accepted that part of normal modern-day society.

Almost 50 years ago, women in America got the chance to have a measure of control over their own bodies. That was taken away in a big way Friday, although some states will be safe havens for legal abortion because their laws and their state Supreme Court decisions have turned Roe v. Wade into state law.

What surely troubles me, and should trouble anyone with a brain, are the states that passed "trigger" laws that wiped out any and all forms of legal abortion once Roe v. Wade was overturned. Some of those states have banned ALL forms, even when the life of the mother is threatened by a failed pregnancy. Or what about a violent rape that results in a pregnancy? The most heinous violation of all, and the victim must be forced to carry her attacker's child to term? The potential for life-long psychological suffering for both mother and child is staggering.

I can't even imagine it, in fact. I'm a man. I can never be forced to make that decision or live with its consequences. And that's why I have always believed that I (or anyone else with a penis) lack the right equipment or life experience to dictate what decisions a woman should be forced to make regarding her own body.

Yes, we have become a nation with more respect for an unborn fetus's existence than for the lives of young schoolchildren that may die in a hail of bullets because the small-dicked gun lobby can't envision life without their AR-15s by their sides.

I am profoundly sorry as I write this. I'm sorry that for women all over this country, triumph one day turned to tragedy the next. I'm sorry that men have given you another reason to look at all of us as "the bad guys" in all this. I'm even sorry for the curious preponderance of women in some parts of the country that allow their warped, fundamentalist religious beliefs to trap them in a web of continued subservience to their male partners. They fail to take responsibility for their own existence because their God tells them that's so -- and in that, they have become traitors to their gender and traitors to a nation, effectively blocking the efforts of our Constitution to offer full and righteous equality to all of its citizens.

If women throughout America would rise up in unison to reject this draconian decision, it would be reversed. I fully believe that. 

One last note -- I was warned earlier today that this was not a day in which any man should be telling women that they NEED to do something, but I disagree. We're not getting the job done, ladies, so you must. My most fervent wish is that you succeed where we have failed.

Remembering an athlete with a big shot and an even bigger heart.

The Sun Chronicle's lead sports page on March 16, 1987.

The years are not kind to the human body, but they are even less kind to the paper upon which your daily newspaper is printed. It yellows quickly and crumbles not long after, unless it is somehow encased in a substance that takes air and moisture out of the equation.

As a former sports journalist, I once wanted to preserve everything I wrote -- as if there was a larger purpose to be served by these words in posterity. But as the years of my career passed and the words increased in numbers from the thousands to the millions and probably billions (if not more), there was no longer enough storage space to save all this flammable newsprint. Indeed, years ago, the wakeup call came when news out of Taunton revealed that a long-time writer for the Taunton Daily Gazette had perished in a fire at his home because he could not find a path out of danger through all the stacks of old newspapers that littered every room.

I probably sent thousands of pounds of newsprint to the recycling bins over the years, including in the days immediately following the decision by new ownership to terminate my employment in August 2018. Bin after bin were filled with the remnants of my career, each of the preserved papers featuring something that I believed to be remarkable and worth preservation before the management made it clear that I was not to linger on the premises. It suddenly became quite easy to throw out so many memories.

But I saved some. And early this morning, when I read the first obituary appearing on The Sun Chronicle's website, I knew I had to leave no stone unturned to find one particular newspaper.

The obituary was of someone I still consider a "young" woman -- certainly a lot younger than I am. Her name upon her passing on Saturday of last week was Heidi Deppisch Robinson. She had turned 53 a little more than a month ago. I knew her best as Heidi Deppisch, a member of an illustrious basketball family in North Attleboro and one of the best players on the North Attleboro High School girls' basketball team that won the MIAA Division 2 state championship on Saturday, March 14, 1987, with a 70-61 victory over Athol High at what was then known as the Worcester Centrum.

Heidi Deppisch, 53

Heidi, a 6-footer that had what they call "inside-outside" skills, was equally as adept at playing in the paint as she was at shooting from 20 feet out or beyond in the days before the three-point circle. On this particular day, she was North Attleboro's leading scorer with 21 points, connecting on nine of 13 shot attempts and three of four free throws. Teammates Stephanie Cooper (20 points) and Alyssa Gutauskas (18) also brought their "A" games, as North mounted a 41-17 lead by halftime and never looked back.

But there was something very special about Heidi's performance that day -- so special that, among the other stories that were written by myself and former colleague Bob Croce on that afternoon for publication in the following Monday's paper (we did not have a Sunday paper at the time), I devoted the space usually reserved for an opinion column to inform our readers of what made Heidi's performance unique.

Here is what that column said under the headline, "Heidi Deppisch's doubts disappeared at game time."

A couple of days before the state Division 2 girls' basketball championship game, Heidi Deppisch asked a reporter an innocent-enough question.

"What's the Centrum like," she said. The reporter offered a brief description of what playing in a large, metropolitan arena was like in contrast to playing in a cozier high school gymnasium, but the explanation didn't fully answer Heidi's question.

"No," she said, "I mean, don't they have chairs and stuff behind the baskets?"

The reporter said yes, there are chairs and stuff.

"So if I shoot an air ball," she said, "it won't go halfway down the other end of the place, will it?"

The question was so typically Heidi Deppisch -- almost apologetic, yet thoroughly honest.

For a large part of the three years she, Stephanie Cooper and Alyssa Gutauskas have directed the fortunes of the North Attleboro High School girls' basketball team, Heidi has been the most anonymous of the three, the one most often overlooked by casual observers. Maybe it's her shy demeanor, or the fact that her strengths -- passing, rebounding, shot-blocking, the occasional outside shot -- aren't always noticed by those who watch only the bouncing ball or the basket.

But Saturday afternoon at Worcester's Centrum, it was impossible not to notice the Rocketeers' 5-foot-11 1/2 forward. Heidi Deppisch was ablaze with glory, calling an end to her high school career with the greatest game she has ever played.

And she picked the right time -- the game for the state championship.

Deppisch scored a career-high 21 points -- on 9-for-13 shooting from the floor and 3-for-4 from the foul line -- to lead her Rocketeers to a 70-61 win over Athol for the Division 2 state title. She was a powerful force from the second she stepped onto the court to the second she stepped off it, and never anything less.

This was also the same girl who, before the game, couldn't buy a warm-up basket.

"I looked over there and Heidi wasn't hitting anything," said Rick Smith, her coach. "So I looked away. (Assistant coach) Debbie Dalton had to come over an nudge me later to tell me she hit a couple."

Any similarities to the shy girl who feared throwing up perpetually-rolling air balls , the nervous one who couldn't find the range in warm-ups, and the dynamo who buried jumper after jumper from the outer reaches of the Centrum were not entirely coincidental. They were one and the same girl -- just different sides of her.

"I was worried," Heidi said upon emerging from the locker room after the game, her eyes reddened from the tears of joy she and her teammates shared. "The court really was different. It was a lot like playing in Franklin, only worse. I wasn't too sure in warm-ups that I could shoot here."

Somewhere between warm-ups and game time, something clicked in Heidi.

"It was the last game," she said. "That's what it was. It was knowing that we'd never play another game together, that there won't be any practice tomorrow, and that was the last game for Mr. Smith, too."

Once the game started, Deppisch hit the first shot she threw at the basket, a 15-footer from the left baseline. She also hit the second, a converted offensive rebound, and the third, another baseline pop.

By that time, she had told all of Athol, all of Worcester and anyone else who cared to listen that this was her game.

"I just got lucky," she said modestly, the sort of answer one would expect. Her coach and teammates thought otherwise.

"Heidi wasn't going to be denied," said Smith, who ended his career as the girls' coach Saturday. "She's sort of an unknown quantity in that people look at our frontcourt, see 5-10, 5-11 and 5-11 and think it's tough, but here's a 5-11 kid who can hurt you from outside, too."

"Heidi played the greatest game of her life today," added Gutauskas, the senior captain and center, who finished with 18 points to bring her own career total to 1,111. "What a way to end it. She was really terrific."

Deppisch scored 11 points in the first half as the Rocketeers rolled for a 41-17 lead over the reeling Western Mass. champions. But in the second half, Athol came back to life.

With tenacious guard Christine Chi creating havoc on defense and forward Lynn Dorrow hitting just about everything she threw at the basket, the Red Raiders cut that 24-point lead to a more manageable 16 entering the fourth quarter.

Suddenly, Deppisch became the "stopper" -- the clutch shooter who put the brakes on surge after surge by the Raiders. She hit a turnaround jumper just outside the lane on a quick pass from Cooper to open the fourth quarter. Then after a run of six more Athol points, she followed a foul shot by Gutauskas with a nothing-but-net jumper from a spot on the court which wasn't too far from the NBA three-point circle.

Athol reduced the margin to 11 points with two more left-handed hook shots by Dorrow. And again, following a free throw by Gutauskas, Cooper spied Deppisch cutting from right to left on the baseline. The pass was there, Heidi released the fall-away, and swish! -- a 13-point lead with 4:06 left.

"That's the best that play has worked all year," Cooper said. "I had no worries when I got the ball to Heidi."

Athol coach Mike King appreciated Deppisch's efforts, too.

"We tried to pack it in the middle more in the second half, and we did play better, " he said. "But it doesn't matter when 13 (Deppisch) can bury three 15-footers from the corner in a row."

The road to Saturday wasn't always a smooth one for Heidi Deppisch. Had she not been fitted for contact lenses this year and overcome the aggravations of adjusting to them, she and her teammates might not be state champions today. 

And she readily admits to uncertainty about her future, particularly in regard to basketball. She may, indeed, never play another game -- which would break the hearts of the collegiate coaches and scouts who saw her light up the Centrum Saturday.

But that was the last thing in her mind when the cheers faded away into the silence of the post-game locker room.

"We came back to the locker room, all of us with tears in our eyes, and people were asking us if we lost," she said, barely holding back more tears. "It was all we could think about, that it was over after all these years. All of a sudden, we started bawling our eyes out." 

Tears of joy, though -- the joy of knowing the rare feeling of being the absolute best at something, and wishing it could continue forever.

It can't, of course. But someday soon, when she no longer feels sadness over leaving behind these joyous times, Heidi Deppisch will be able to remember that on Saturday, she was the best of the best -- and there's no better way to end a high school career.

I'm glad I was able to find this remnant of a more innocent past, because it served to refresh my age-challenged memory and correct a few misrepresentations of fact that developed over the 35 years since that game was played. Indeed, many of Heidi's teammates didn't see her as shy at all. She was somewhat of a jokester and someone that knew how to diffuse tense situations with a quick quip. I needed to be reminded that what I perceived as shyness was just a natural reaction to being interviewed by someone 15 years her senior.

I'm glad that later in our lives, Heidi and I were able to maintain a measure of contact through social media. I'm also glad I never failed to tell her how much I still enjoyed my memories of her basketball career and my appreciation of her skills. And yes, I did poke a little fun at her abiding love for the Dallas Cowboys from time to time. But not too often.

I don't know the particulars of Heidi's passing and will not speculate. All I know is that I feel the same emptiness in my heart today as I did on Sept. 7, 1997, when I learned that Alyssa Gutauskas had passed at just 28 years of age. It hurts even more to know that Heidi's two children will no longer have their loving mother at their sides.

Heidi, Alyssa and all of those '87 Rocketeers are still happy-go-lucky kids in my mind, blazing trails on the basketball court for others to follow and crying those tears of joy in each other's arms outside their Worcester Centrum locker room.