St. Mary’s-Bay View star Brittany Wilson can’t block the final seconds of Sunday’s loss to La Salle from her head.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

EAST PROVIDENCE — Sometimes you find great sports lessons when you’re not expecting them.

I was half-watching the Division I girls basketball title game between La Salle and St. Mary’s-Bay View that was on Cox the other night, a tape of the game that had been played Sunday night in the Ryan Center, when I witnessed an amazing finish.

Bay View, which had led most of the second half, was poised for the big upset, La Salle having come into the game undefeated. Now they were up one with a handful of seconds left, and all they had to do was run out the clock and the state title would be theirs. Until someone threw the ball back underneath the Bay View basket and it got tipped into the hands of a La Salle player who put it in, and La Salle won, a basketball version of pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

But what was so compelling to me was that as the La Salle players erupted in joyous celebration there on the television screen was Bay View star Brittany Wilson collapsed on the floor in utter devastation.

There were the two images, almost as if freeze-framed: the two images of sport right there in the flickering images of the TV screen, the winners and the losers, the essence of sport.

It’s easy to forget that. To forget the fact that when someone wins, someone else loses.

We so much like winners. They are the fodder of every Hollywood movie, the fodder of our dreams. They are what we all want to be, the embodiment of our fantasies. Winners make us feel good. We think of sports and we think of winners. Losers? Losers usually slink away in the shadows, like extras no longer needed in the script, instantly forgettable.

But there they were on television the other night, the La Salle girls in wild celebration, Wilson lying on the floor in anguish.

“It was the worst feeling I ever felt,” she said. “We had worked so hard, we were going to win. And then all of a sudden it was over and we had lost.”

It was Tuesday afternoon, almost 48 hours after the game, and Wilson was sitting in an office at Bay View saying how she had been between the foul line and midcourt when that last play happened, too far away to do anything about it, but with a clear view of how it unfolded.

“Oh, my God,” she had thought as she watched it. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

And making it worse was that Bay View was going to beat La Salle, the same La Salle that had lorded it over them all year, the same La Salle where she knew so many of their players, including her best friend, Willeen Capehart, who even had spent the day before the game at her house. The same La Salle that had beaten them by 30 earlier in the year and had spent the days before the game on projo.com saying they were going to do it again.

She didn’t remember falling to the floor, only that she was crying as if her world had ended, and when her teammates came over to pick her up that only made her cry more.

“We went into the huddle and everyone was crying,” she said. “I wanted to leave, but I knew that wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t have been good sportsmanship.”

So she stayed through the awards ceremony, then went into the locker room, and the more her coach, Doug Haynes, talked, the more she cried. Afterward, a lot of her teammates were going out to eat, but she went home instead, where she cried some more. Monday she didn’t go to school, didn’t want to see anyone.

And every time she closed her eyes she could see that last play in her head. Or else she would sit there and think that even though she had scored 23 points, she hadn’t done enough, that if she had just been able to do a little more, then this wouldn’t have happened. As if it were somehow her fault, even though she had nothing to do with the play.

Wilson was learning firsthand that it’s not always about cheers and postgame celebrations.

But what she didn’t know as she sat there in the office Tuesday afternoon is that she will play other big games. She is a wonderful high school player, fluid and athletic, already talented enough to get as many as 10 recruiting letters a day, letters from all over the East.

It’s all so different from when she first visited Bay View before her freshman year and didn’t want to go, because it was so different from what she knew. Too white. All girls. A private school. She looked around and said no way.

Until her mother said two words that changed everything: You’re going. And even though her freshman year was difficult, she now has come to know that the world has opened up to her in ways that seemed unimaginable before she came here, even if it takes a couple of buses every day to go from Silver Lake to Bay View, a journey that’s not only about miles.

The other thing that she cannot know yet is that losing is as much a part of sports as winning is. That, in truth, they are two sides of the same coin, forever linked together; that every time someone wins someone else loses. And that for every team that wins in some joyous celebration the other team slinks off the court in failure, and that that’s the chance you take when you play, what you sign up for if you play sports, whether you realize it or not.

And what did she learn from Sunday night’s horror, now that she had a couple of days to think about it, now that a little bit of the pain has subsided, now that she’s had a crash course in losing a huge game in one of the most cruelest ways imaginable?

“We just have to come back harder next year,” said Wilson.

Good for her.

breynold@projo.com