It will be a while before any championships are discovered in the world of basketball. Let me talk men’s basketball for a second or two. We haven’t even had the Southwest Conference tournament – it’s not the Southwest Conference – you know the Big 12 or whatever they call it. Anyway, we haven’t even started the NBA finals which go to June. College basketball will go to April I guess. But no college basketball games so to speak. So far, we haven’t turned the page on another basketball season in high school ball.

What I’m trying to say is that basketball is a long way from being completed. It used to go about three months longer than I thought it should and then the finals would come up, but it’s almost like that now. Still the finals are a long way off. You have to play all of them from the opening round to the final round.

The first thing that comes up is high school basketball. They are a week or two away from finishing the season. But when you get to college and all of that and you look the thing up they are still a long way from doing anything. I used to keep up with it a lot more than I do now because I had a Howard Payne team, women’s fact is, it didn’t matter back then men or women, but we had a great women’s team back in 2008. In fact, I would say that involved a lot of people very deeply. Most of you will remember when we won the National Championship and became one of the first teams in their Division ever to go undefeated. Undefeated! They were really something special. I thought that would last a good long while but it lasted exactly a year. We battled for it for about two or three years.

This year, the Howard Payne women didn’t get there but the Howard Payne men did. I’m kind of here today to say what a lot of people will say – “Hey! It’s time to get excited!” I don’t even know what the format is for Howard Payne but I do know Nadir Dalleh and I do know that he became the coach a little while back and all of a sudden we have a chance – and we might as well say it before it’s over – we have a chance to win the National Championship. The first thing we’ve got to do is win the first game, and I think we can, so Tuesday night we have the first game. It’s the quarterfinal game and we play East Texas Baptist and we play them in the Brownwood Coliseum. You have to win the first one to move on to the semifinal game. That second game will be on Friday night in Abilene. All the games will be somewhere beside home. The third game will be on the road. Then you win the Conference Championship and I think you go to a Regional Tournament and you have to win that. Then you have to go to the National Regional and you have to win that. And you go to the National Tournament and they’re all road games. We’d get to play all of them and I hope you know that. I know this much, it’s winner take all. You win the first game and you get to play the second. You win the second and you get to play the third and on and on.

Howard Payne has a fun team this year! They have an enjoyable team! They won a game on the road the other night in the regular season finale which they had to win. They won it 90-88 and now they get a home game to start the road to the American Southwest Conference Tournament. Believe it or not, a home game! It comes across as nothing more than that – a home game. If they win that they will get a visitor’s game. If they win that it will be another visitor’s game. Everything will be visitors from there on I believe. It will be extremely tough. It will be a span of about ten or twelve games or something like that, and all of them will be tough. At least, we’re getting an unexpected home game. Yes, it will be nearly impossible, but sure is a lot of fun to be playing at home once again.

Until next time, so long everybody.

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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].