Goodbye to By, and all that

Memory plays you like a carnival huckster sometimes. You know how things went down back in the day as surely as you know the pea is under that shell on the right -- except somehow it turns up under the shell in the middle, and damned if you know how it got there.

And so let's begin this morning by saying By Hey did not wear the black hat we always imagined him wearing.

This is to say Hey's mighty North Side legions did not always knock our New Haven Bulldogs out of the sectional each year, even if it seemed that way. Come March we'd put on our little paper bowlers and our purple-and-gold and traipse off to Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, and there By would be waiting with Doug Brown or John Ankenbruck or Dave Moser, and, dagnabit, guess it's time for track and baseball.

And so By was the bad guy, always. That we were no more right about that than some rube about the pea under the shell is worth acknowledging today, as word comes down that By has passed at the full and generous age of 91.

Few better embodied what Indiana high school basketball was in its full flower, when there were hundreds of teams in hundreds of tiny dots on the map, and come March they all went into the same hopper. By was the quintessential product of that era, a Fort Wayne boy who played at Concordia and then came back to town as an assistant at Central and then head coach at his alma mater,  and then went on to spend 31 decorated years at North Side.

By the time he gave up the whistle, he'd won 550 games across 34 seasons and took Moser and North to the state finals in 1965, where they lost to Billy Keller and Indianapolis Washington in the state championship game.

But somewhere in all of that, there was more.

Somewhere in those 550 wins were cold winter nights in warm well-lit places, and the thick perfume of popcorn. There was the adolescent chanting of cheerleaders, the gleam of a hardwood floor, rippling nylon on an orange rim. There was the shriek of a whistle, the shriek of outrage that attended it, and then Boy, look at Coach Hey, he's really giving that ref what-for.

By was a thread that led us back to those days, and to imagine that they no longer exist even though they do. Everything we remember about what Indiana high school basketball was in that era still exists, even though every geezer lighting a candle to Bobby Plump 'n' them  refuses to believe it.

If there are four classes now, and girls basketball, too, there are still cold winter nights and warm well-lit places. If there is no longer a sectional in Fort Wayne, or Hilliard Gates and Peter Eckrich bringing you the action live from the BEAUTIFUL War Memorial Coliseum, there remains the shriek of whistles in the background -- eliciting, of course, the same timeless shrieks of outrage.

There is also an acknowledgment that memory is imperfect. Which gets us back to By Hey and black hats.

In later years, see, this New Haven grad got to know By, and a more gracious and effervescent man never breathed air. A coach to his bones, he always wanted to talk basketball when I'd bump into him in some warm well-lit place. and his enthusiasm in doing so always lit it further. It was simply impossible not to like the man.

And so, goodbye to By, and to all that. An era doesn't die with him, but it perhaps grows a bit dimmer.

But like his enthusiasm, and his passion, its essence never does.