Success on a youth basketball court

A memory triggered: I've been streaming Friday Night Lights and in the

third season now. Focus is on a school in a poor town trying to resurrect its football  team and the subsequent losses. In the third game they play a top team and as expected they lose but this time they scored and gave that top team a tough time of it. Afterward the coach built them up with words about how well they played. 

     The memory? I was coaching a youth league basketball team. About halfway through the season they still hadn't won a game. During practice the week after theat midway loss I taught them a new defensive scheme (box and one). Our next game came on a Saturday of a Super Bowl weekend. The team they played was leading the league at the time. Our team went out and forced two overtime periods, only to lose by one point. Coming off the court a couple of them were even crying. (These kids were in fifth and sixth grade.) I called them in close and then told them they had played the best game of the season, they took a top team to two overtimes and only lost by a point and they should be proud of that and take that into the next game. I recall joking with some happy parents that despite the next day's Super Bowl we had probably seen the best game we were going to see that weekend.           After that we never lost another game for the rest of the season and won the league championship. I'm looking forward to the rest of the Friday Night Lights season, but I think I know the ending already.

A sidebar to that story: My assistant coach that season was my own son, an eighth grader at the time. The championship game came down to a last minute in-bounds play to break a tie. My son gently told me to stand back and he got down on the floor with the players to lay out that play. They went out and executed perfectly, scoring the winning basket as time expired.