Indeed, it never gets old.

Foxboro coach Lisa Downs sports "the pink suit" that her athletes bought for her.

"It never gets old." 

I heard that from over my right shoulder, and I turned toward the sound to see who had said it.

"It never gets old," repeated the cameraman from Foxboro Cable Access who had joined me Saturday at court level inside the Tsongas Center in Lowell to perform post-game interviews with members of the Foxboro High School girls' basketball team following their 73-53 win over Dracut High School for the state Division 2 basketball championship.

Of course, the folks in Foxboro are old hand at this. The Warriors (and I won't join the nickname debate in this missive) have brought three titles home to the town they call "the Gem of Norfolk County" since 2018, although they've only been able to celebrate two of them because the middle one, in 2020, was shared with another team. The start of the panic over COVID-19 prevented a title game and a likely celebration.

Still, truer words were never spoken. I may be getting old, but watching a bunch of high school athletes come home with a title after a rugged season that can include as many as 28 games is always a supremely enjoyable thing. And that's probably why, after the 60-mile drive home from Lowell, I parked near the Foxboro Common and waited for the team buses to return, complete with escorts from the police and fire departments, and take a couple of laps around while a healthy throng of basketball fans cheered every orbit.

I've been fortunate in my many years as a local sportswriter and now a play-by-play announcer for cable TV to have seen and covered quite a few state championships -- especially in recent years.

Alyssa Gutauskas, NAHS '87

My first came in 1987, when a lovable assemblage of players from North Attleboro took home the Division 2 title by beating Athol High, 70-61, at the Worcester Centrum. This close-knit group was spearheaded by center Alyssa Gutauskas, shooting forward Heidi Deppisch, shooting guard Stephanie Cooper and point guard Rachael Routhier, and those young women cried tears of joy after accomplishing the goal which they worked so hard and so long to attain.

In 1991, a new group of Rocketeers led by Boston University-bound Julie Schmidt and Wheaton-bound Dee Robichaud would work their particular gifts to peak levels, and they defeated Southwick (led by future UConn star Rebecca Lobo) by a 59-32 score. Local girls' basketball was indeed alive in thriving in our corner of the commonwealth.

The 1995 Foxboro girls, then coached by Dan Damish, were a young and scrappy team that ignored the pundits' lack of respect for their pedigree. That team battled tooth-and-nail with an overconfident Lee team which had almost pulled out the victory with time ticking away in the first overtime at the Worcester Centrum. But diminutive Foxboro point guard Jamie Kelley threw up a prayer of a three-pointer at the buzzer and it touched nothing but net to tie the score. Foxboro dominated the second extra session and prevailed 65-62 to take home the Division 3 crown.

There were frustrations along the way before I would see my next championship. Foxboro's girls would reach the state D3 title game two more times (1997 and 2003) only to be frustrated by Lee each time. Seekonk, led by the incomparable Kim Lynch, lost the D3 title to Lee in 1990 and was bumped up to D2 in 1992, only to lose to Oxford. And I was denied the opportunity to see the Attleboro boys win the D1 crown in 1998, beating Milford at what's now the DCU Center, because the newspaper for which I worked thought it was more important for me to be doing page layouts back in the Attleboro office.

I'm still angry about that.

A long drought followed. We had several teams advance to the state semifinals only to be frustrated in their quests for statewide glory. The biggest tease of all came in 2013, when the boys' basketball team from my alma mater, Mansfield High, advanced to the Centrum and their first Division 1 state title game in the school's history -- only to run into a team stocked with talent, Putnam Voke of Springfield. The Hornets extended Putnam to overtime, and if only Rocky DeAndrade had been maybe 5 feet closer to the rim on his game-ending desperation three-pointer, they might still be playing today. Putnam won, 50-47.

Lauren Manis won a title at Feehan.

Things were looking up when the terrific tandem of guard Katie Nelson and forward Lauren Manis brought home from Springfield (the birthplace of the game, of course) a Division 1 title for Bishop Feehan with a victory over Natick in 2016. And two years later, back in Springfield again, I enjoyed one of the biggest thrills of my life when I got to write about the Foxboro girls' Division 2 victory over Hopkinton in the morning, and the Mansfield High boys' Division 1 triumph over Hockomock League rival Franklin in the evening. Given that I was in the last five months of my sportswriting career (although I didn't know it at the time), I felt justified in elevating those two games to the pinnacle of the Mount Rushmore of important events I had covered in my lifetime.

The job is different now, and so are the tools of the trade. I use microphones and headsets now instead of notepads and pens. I prefer to be way up in the stands or in designated broadcast locations than down on the floor at the press table. And my main focus is upon my voice instead of my writing skills.

But the thrill is the same. And this year, I was hoping for thrice the satisfaction.

One out of three wasn't bad, as it turned out.

Three of the teams I embrace as "local," and for which my current employers provide cable TV coverage of their athletic teams, advanced to state title games this year. The Mansfield boys, Bishop Feehan girls and Foxboro girls all reached their respective big games, and I would have a hand in covering two out of the three.

Most of the time in a winter season, I serve as the primary play-by-play voice of Mansfield boys' and girls' basketball for Mansfield Cable Access. Most of my time this year, however, was spoken for by North Attleborough Community Television (North TV), where I assumed the responsibility of calling games in several sports played by teams from North Attleboro, Bishop Feehan, King Philip and Tri-County. For the last three years I've just called games at KP for them, but when a full-time employee left late last year, it was "next man up," and that was me. And because of a long friendship with Foxboro girls' coach Lisa Downs, I've always been welcome to step into the announcer's seat for a few of the Warriors' games on Foxboro Cable Access.

I drew the assignments of announcing the Mansfield boys' game against Malden Catholic, on Friday night at the Tsongas Center in Lowell, and the Foxboro girls' game against Dracut on Saturday. And had I been asked, despite the recent strain upon my 69-year-old vocal cords that has practically rendered me silent since then (and who'd believe that??), I would have done the Feehan game on Friday night as well.

I won't bore you with the details of the title games, as there is plenty of reading material out there on the World Wide Web about those. Friday's games were both losses, Mansfield losing by 18 to Malden Catholic and Feehan by seven to Andover. I will say, however, how proud I am of Mansfield getting to a state final despite losing two valuable starters to injuries in the course of the tournament. And the Shamrocks, trailing Andover by double digits early in the second half, battled it back to a one-possession game in the final minutes before running out of time. That was a very good effort as well.

But the Saturday game was something special.

I don't get to announce too many Foxboro games because of the demands made upon me by all of the other schools. But when I do, I guess you could say it is because of personal favors performed by Foxboro coach Lisa Downs for me, and by me for her.

Foxboro's Lisa Garland in 1983.

As the former Lisa Garland always reminds her team and their families when it's time for the yearly break-up banquet, she and I have known each other for a long time -- a VERY long time, more than 40 years (although I certainly show the wear and tear of those years a lot more). I covered her games as a high school athlete, when she was a tall and talented forward for Nancy Woicik's Foxboro Warriors at the beginning of what would become an amazing run of success for the girls' teams from that school. She scored 607 career points, topped out at 14 points a game in a season in which she graced our all-star team at my former newspaper, and she showed a penchant for defense that she would exploit to its fullest as a player at Southeastern Massachusetts University (now UMass-Dartmouth), where she would be named defensive player of the year twice during her career.

After SMU, she made her way back to Foxboro basketball as an assistant on Dan Damish's staff. She also planned to start a family with her husband (a Mansfield fellow, natch) and almost appeared ready to start it during the 1995 state championship game against Lee at the then-Worcester Centrum (as she was the proverbially "pregnant-out-to-here" at the time).

Lisa and Jeff were blessed with three boys over the years, and as they grew older, she once again got the itch to coach. She coached both boys and girls in the Foxboro youth leagues before accepting a job as an assistant coach on the FHS staff of former teammate Sarah Behn in 2006. She then rose to the top job when Behn left to coach at UMass-Lowell.

She's been in that job for 12 full seasons now, and the results speak for themselves. At the top of her many accomplishments are three state Division 2 championships -- in 2018, 2020 and the third arriving a little more than a week ago. 

Yes, the 2020 title was a shared one, presented to both Foxboro and Taconic Regional of Pittsfield because they won their respective state semifinals and would have met for the championship if not for the intervention of the COVID-19 panic. But take it from me, if they had met for the title, Foxboro would have won the game by 30 points. Taconic has since dropped to Division 5 in the new statewide alignment, which leads me to believe that the school did not belong in Division 2 three years ago and would have suffered a suitable and just fate.

It's hard for me to be totally objective where Lisa Downs is concerned. She and I have become good friends over the years. She has been the most frequent guest on my currently-on-hiatus podcast, "The Owner's Box," having reached five appearances before computer problems sidelined the production temporarily.

No, I didn't get her a five-timers jacket like the Saturday Night Live skit. We joked about that, though.

And no, I don't openly root for her or her teams during games (I try not to do that for any team I cover, even for my alma mater the next town over, although it is difficult sometimes), but were I just another fan in the stands, I surely would. I respect not only what she has accomplished, but also how she has accomplished it.

Downs reacts during the title game.

Downs is a tough and demanding coach, no doubt about it. She drills her players to be smart, precise and totally respectful of the team concept. She is intense, almost fanatical in her preparation, and she's not afraid to stomp her feet or let out a yelp when an official's call is clearly blown. I half-jokingly call her a throwback to another era -- of the coaches I grew up watching in the 1960s and 1970s like North Attleboro's Ken Pickering, Mansfield's John Dunn, Oliver Ames' Val Muscato and others, whose sideline reactions were sometimes more entertaining than the games themselves.

But for all that energy and emotion that's on display, Downs never takes it to excess. The most important thing for her is to be protective of her players. She is totally committed to putting them in positions where they can succeed, and to teach them how to be accountable for their own performances and accountable to their teammates.

And she has never forgotten that the game is supposed to be fun. Her enjoyment of the game is displayed on the sideline far more often than any moments of displeasure with the trends of a game in progress. Her teammates see that in her every day in practice. And every now and then, a little snippet of video sneaks out of the inner sanctum and you can see Lisa and her "silly girls," as she sometimes calls this current team, singing and celebrating on the team bus on the way home from another victory.

On top of all that, basketball is not the only passion in Lisa's life. She is the office manager and the registrar at the Sage School in Foxboro, which offers challenging and nourishing education for gifted children from pre-kindergarten through Grade 8. She also has continued the work of her late mother by devoting herself to the Foxboro Discretionary Fund and the Foxboro Food Pantry, as a former director and still remaining very involved in their missions to help needy families in her hometown.

I've talked many times in the past about what I felt was the importance of having young women return to girls' basketball as coaches. It's taken more than a half-century after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law for people to catch on to that, and now half of the Hockomock League's 12 coaches are women -- although that number has actually declined a little in recent years because a couple of coaches moved on. Sports are still a meritocracy, you know. If a better job comes along, you take it. And if you're not doing the job, you lose it. Reproductive organs should not play into those decisions in a perfect world.

I have also always said that athletes of either gender will respect a coach of either gender if that coach proves worthy of that respect. You need look no farther than Norwood, where former Braintree girls' coach Kristen McDonnell brought the Mustang boys to a state Division 2 title game last year. She's now back to coaching girls, at Norwood where she is a guidance counselor, but were I in a position to hire a boys' coach and she was available, I'd offer it to her without hesitation.

However, because young women are often made to take an athletic back seat despite federal law that demands otherwise, I do think it's important for them to have strong female role models to underscore the fact that there should be no limitations to what they can expect to achieve -- either on a playing field or in life. Lisa Downs has been the gold standard for that locally.

So that's why I try to work in a telecast or two for the Warriors amid my busy schedule. And that's why, after she gets my email telling her I might be available, she puts me at the top of the list of volunteers that might otherwise be doing the call. Fortunately, I haven't pissed off too many people for cutting in line like that.

Lest you think this is just one big gush over Foxboro's coach, I want to make sure I get my two cents in about all of the outstanding athletes that played in three state title games up in Lowell. After all, when all is said and done, it's still their game and no one else's.

Eddie McCoy led Mansfield's attack.

Of course, I was closest to Mansfield this season because I did more games of their boys and girls than I did of any other team. I would be remiss if I did not tip my cap to Hornet senior Abby Wager for leading the charge of her team to second place in the Davenport Division of the Hockomock (behind Foxboro) and then into a tough Division 1 tournament matchup on the road against Newton North -- a game in which she became only the third Mansfield girl in history to reach 1,000 career points.

The Hornet boys were well on their way to another great season when trouble arose at the start of the Division 2 tournament -- first losing starting point guard Devon Sanders with a broken leg, then losing outstanding rebounder Trevor Foley to a broken foot. These injuries occurred early in the Hornets' five-game run to the state title game, but not until they faced the other-worldly shooting of Malden Catholic were they deterred from their mission.

Junior Eddie McCoy absolutely lit it up in the tournament, while veterans such as Caden Colby and Chris Hill stepped up their games. And senior forward JT Veiking and sophomore Nate Creedon were asked to assume much larger roles and they did so willingly. This was a courageous team that had confidence in itself and left every ounce of its effort on the court.

Mary Daley was dynamic defensively.

I had the pleasure of calling a couple of Bishop Feehan's games for North TV, and I really enjoyed what I saw. Coach Amy Dolores assembled a very good mix of youngsters and veterans, and they navigated a tough Division 1 tournament field to get to the final. 

Samantha Reale, Julia Webster, Maddy Steel, Charlotte Adams-Lopez and Mary Daley combined to average 50 of Feehan's 63 points a game, and while faced with a superior opponent in top-seed Andover, the Shamrocks made it a one-possession game in the waning minutes before falling to a seven-point defeat. Several of the Shamrocks will return next year, and Coach Dolores has a good thing going on Holcott Drive, so maybe more good things are in store.

Last but not least, I really enjoyed watching this Foxboro team this year. My first exposure to them in person was in a dominating non-league game against Hingham, and we did one of their games against King Philip on North TV, but I feel like I knew them as if I had been there for every game thanks to the folks at Foxboro Cable Access and their frequent telecasts.

The Warriors already had a great nucleus of players in returning juniors Cam Collins -- possibly one of the most consistent players I've ever seen in that she rarely deviated by more than a basket on either side of her 17-point average -- and Erin Foley, equally capable of popping in a three or taking a charge, and a budding sophomore star in Kailey Sullivan. Junior Izzy Chamberlin was a solid rebounder and fully committed to the team concept, and all that was needed was one more cog in the machine -- and the Warriors got it in a "big" way.

Addie Ruter was a towering presence for FHS.

Addie Ruter, standing 6-foot-3 as a sophomore, came in with a well-developed set of skills and a great foundation in fundamentals. Slender and very athletic, Ruter proved that she knew that a 6-3 girl should play like 6-3, and not 5-3. She kept the ball out of everyone's reach. She moved quickly and purposefully without wasted motion. And her mid-range shot was even more of a weapon than her in-the-paint forays, because it left opposing teams feeling hopeless in their efforts to defend her.

Those five, and reserves Ava Hill and Kylie Sampson among others, proved an unbeatable combination. Having a future State Coaches Hall of Fame member on the sideline directing them certainly didn't hurt the cause, either.

Simply stated, Dracut never had a chance. And the best part of it all -- most of the Foxboro roster, including their top eight players this year, returns next year.

What a season. And what a joy it was to cover it -- even if I am in a different role than I was for more than 50 years. It's the kind of stuff I wish I could cover for another 50 years.

Thanks to the athletes, the coaches, my fellow announcers, everyone at the cable systems where I work, and to all of the viewers that invited me into their homes to keep telling them stories, although in a different manner than I used to. You all made an old man very happy.

It's true. It never gets old.