“There’s always a chance a tiny spark remains, and sparks turn into flames,”……. The words of the Spinners, back in 1972, were talking about love and a particular relationship which had seen better days. I found myself humming the tune after I noticed a post on a local community’s historical page (Historic New Paltz) of the eleven members of the 1972 men’s varsity basketball team. Through all the deafening, crippling noises out of social media and a widening cultural hysteria came a flickering of light. At the time, I had ditched all expectations, from out of nowhere , in a moment like when you’re visiting the chiropractor, you feel the snap of the adjustment you needed. The team inside the posted photograph had played their last game over 50 years ago (a defeat by their local rivals in the Ulster County Athletic League Championship game}. There they were gathered one last time for the end of the season photo. As a 12-year-old, aspiring to be a varsity athlete, I saw every home game of that 1971-72 campaign. It was unusual for a small high school team to have five or six frontline bangers in the six-foot four range. The team’s size was their biggest strategic advantage, but their glue came from the team’s feisty floor general (Rick Pesavento). It was obvious he was the son of a coach (who himself would go on to be a great coach in his own right), directing the flow of the game the way it was drawn up by Dr. Naismith. For myself, that team characterized everything that I loved about growing up in small town America. There was nothing better than a Friday night in January when Wallkill, or Highland pulled their busses into the Larry Johnson gymnasium parking lot and tried to take what was ours.
The Hugies (sometimes erroneously spelled Huggies lol) were our nickname derived from the French religious sect of Huguenots who settled in the area along the Wallkill River. One the streets the Huguenots built their homes is today one of country’s earliest established thoroughfares. After watching the games in person, I would go home to my lighted basket in our driveway and pretend to lead the Huguenots to glory. Growing up within a tightly spun hamlet everything revolved around the public school and your classmates. It has been 53 years since the picture of the gladiators of my youth was taken. Since then, there has been lots of water running under the Carmine Liberta bridge that connects Huguenot street to the Wallkill View farm. Still, the tightest bonds I forged in this life have remained in the place I grew up. I ended up marrying a local girl, came back to teach and coach at my alma mater, and even after leaving education have remained in the Hudson Valley. As a young man I swore I was going to abandon this one-horse valley, but no mattered how determined I seemed to leave it all behind I kept coming back. No matter the ups and downs, the infighting, the backstabbing, and the petty small-town gossip mill we can never escape the town from which we came of age.
I found myself staring at the picture, considering all the garbage that comes through my Facebook feed these days, I didn’t pay much attention to the old team until I went in for a deeper look. ‘Let’s see how many of these guys I can name. Wow, I think I got all eleven.’ Despite a couple of spelling errors, I was confident I hadn’t left anybody behind. Without intent, the process of identifying these heroes of my past brought with it a flood of recent memories in reference to the peers of my adolescence. It was only a few minutes after identifying the individuals that the comments started. Sixty and seventy-year-old Facebook warriors, who spend far too much time attacking each other politically online were now inundating this post with a passion stemming from the early summers of our lives together. The picture had triggered the intense pang of wonderful innocence that can only be harnessed in the small hamlets across these United States. All the cherished recollections of our shared past that we come to understand is at the very root of who we are. Living in the present dystopian society is something none of us had experienced before in our very independent journeys along life’s byways. Somewhere on the way to the last dance we got into a big political donnybrook. The picture served as a spark to conjure up the bittersweet memories of the youth we had shared in the height of our tribalism.
In recent years we have seen a political divide create cracks in our once seemingly unbreakable bonds. Sure, we battled in the 60’s over Vietnam, but we did it while we were hitting a joint or having a beer. The counterculture’s clash with the establishment back in the day pales in comparison to the political gap in ideology in 2025 that has this country teetering on civil war. Lifetime little leaguers and the girl scout friendship are blocking each other on FB over ideologies that neither truly ever understood. As easy as it is to play the blame game in terms of the who and the whys, it quickly escalates into a vicious cycle of name calling and hate. It is never too late for healing while pausing to remember we all came from the same place. We all have a bit of a different perspective of how things looked back then, but we cannot deny when looking at the picture from our past was that through all the recent storms, we could see the light of yesterday. We sat through the same classes with the same teachers. We saved a seat on the bus for a friend and shared a tube with our lab partners. We were in the band; we were up on the stage playing star. We uncompromisingly rooted each other on through whatever endeavor it might have been. We argued about Vietnam, and we lived through the resignation of a president. We went to the prom, spun the bottle under the streetlights, and sat in the hot June heat sweating through state exams. We spent the burning hot summer nights under the dashboard light searching for lust. We had strong individual families and one great big family of community. How lucky we all are that when we look back it is with an overall fondness of the experience we shared together as we came of age.
When the picture of the 1972 basketball team was posted we were sent back to a time when our whole world was centered around what happened to us that day at school. I was a small fish dreaming big, watching in awe at the heroes of my youth and projecting that maybe someday I would get my turn in the arena. At some point along the way I believe we fall in love with the town we grow up in. We have the choice to embrace its’ love or run from its sometimes-suffocating grip.. We leave, or remain, but the unconditional love we receive never leaves our heart. Our hometown takes us in, without an interview, and it is up to everyone to figure how they fit in. Some of us were always convinced we would leave our little town blues behind the second we got our sheepskin. Some of us knew we would never leave New York. There are some still in the local watering holes talking about what how they almost left, or what could have been. No matter which way it was we all shared the common ground of being classmates, Huguenots, teammates, and in many cases soul mates. Looking at the picture, during these culturally fractured times, the familiar faces of an eleven-man basketball team provided a spark to help reconnect what has become a fractioned split in our love affair with our tribesmen. In the past couple of years, the comments amongst old friends took a dramatic turn for the worse. Friends who had been communicating one way or the other since high school were blocking each other out of their feeds and their lives over political discourse. Now this picture was conjuring up the bonds that tied us so tightly shining a light on that special spot in our hearts. The comments were centered around a common theme of pride in a community we still are all proud to represent.
I can see that team running out the door of the visitors’ locker room as the cheerleaders rhythmically chanted: Coach, coach, open up the door, open up the door and let the Hugies on the floor.” There they were sprinting out of the tunnel led by the captains, Jay Ackert, and Rick Pesavento prepared to the take on the Monroe brothers of archrival Highland High. I sat with my dad in the Huguenot section fantasizing of being on the court in a game like this one someday. The Huguenots came up short in that championship game, but the lessons learned from observing them were far more important than the outcome that night. The 1972 Huguenot men’s basketball team taught a selfish young man everything about community and being part of something bigger than yourself. They were my team. They were our team. Fifty-three winters have passed. Social media has both brought us back together and torn us apart at the very same time. In recent years we became more divided than ever, calling each other names and insulting childhood playmates and sweet hearts over political jargon. There are signs of coalescence all around us, we just have to look harder. A simple still picture from the past reminded myself of where I came from and who I really am. There were some shared stories about the young men from a cherished time in our lives, stories of men now starting their eighth decade on earth. There were innocently shared tales of puppy crushes that pass us by. There were jokes about the dominance of the Monroe brothers. I couldn’t help but smile. For myself, a tiny spark still remains. The post of a long ago sporting team turned that spark into flames. And my love burned once again.
