The Scoreboard Sermon: ‘I Don’t Know These Teams Yet. That’s the Point.’

I HAVE BEEN COVERING SPORTS for twenty-two years. I have been in press boxes when dynasties fell. I have been in locker rooms when championships were won in the last thirty seconds by men who would not be able to explain exactly what happened until years later. I have interviewed coaches who were fired before I could file the story. I have watched three no-hitters, one perfect game, and a playoff game decided by a penalty that the referee’s own colleagues later admitted was wrong.

I know how to write a sports story.

What I do not know — what I have never had to know, in twenty-two years — is how to write a sports story when the team has no history. No prior season. No win-loss record. No statistical arc bending toward justice or tragedy. No fan base with opinions formed over a decade of watching the same franchise fail in the same ways at the same moments. Nothing.

Just players. Just coaches. Just the game itself, without the accumulated weight of everything that came before it.

This is, I have decided, the best assignment I have ever had. And I want to tell you why.

When you cover a team with history, you are always covering two things: the game and the narrative. The narrative precedes the game. The narrative interprets the game. The narrative survives the game, intact or revised. A team with a twenty-year losing streak cannot just win a game; it must win the argument that the losing streak meant something and that the win answers it. A team with a dynasty cannot just lose a game; the loss must be incorporated into the dynasty’s mythology as an aberration or a turning point. There is no such thing as a simple game when the game is carrying history.

The Badgers have no history. The Foundry has no history. Tonight’s hockey game is not the continuation of anything. Tomorrow’s football game is not the answer to anything. They are, simply, the first games. The beginning of the thing.

I sat down Thursday morning in the Tribune’s new office — which still smells like fresh paint and which has a coffee situation that Rod Black has publicly acknowledged is unacceptable and that I privately agree with — and I tried to write a preview of tonight’s Badgers game from memory, the way I always write previews. I reached for the file in my head where I keep the team’s history. It was empty. The file is called “Badgers Hockey, Season 1.” There is nothing in it.

And I thought: this is what a new place feels like. You cannot be disappointed by it yet because you do not know what it should have been. You cannot be cynical about it yet because the cynicism requires a prior version to be cynical about. The whole thing is just… possibility.

Frank Drewicz, the Badgers’ head coach, is a man who has coached long enough to have made all the mistakes. You can tell this from the way he speaks about mistakes — not as things to be avoided but as things to be corrected, a distinction that sounds subtle and turns out to matter quite a bit when you are a twenty-three-year-old defenseman who has just done the wrong thing and is bracing for the conversation afterward. Drewicz does not berate. He explains. The explanation contains within it the memory of the mistake the explanation is correcting, and the player walks away understanding not just what to do but why what they did instead was wrong. This is coaching. This is specifically what good coaching looks like and what most people who call themselves coaches are trying to approximate.

Tom Marthaler, the Foundry’s football coach, is a different kind of good. Where Drewicz operates through precision, Marthaler operates through principle. He has given his team a framework for understanding what football means that does not depend on the outcome of Friday’s game: the Foundry plays hard, prepares thoroughly, and does not confuse the score with the work. The score is downstream of the work. The work is the thing you can control.

Both men, I should note, are from Wisconsin. This is not a coincidence. Something about being from Wisconsin produces a specific type of coach: deeply practical, suspicious of abstraction, slightly amused by the suggestion that winning is the only thing. They know that winning is important. They know it more specifically than people from warmer climates, who tend to treat winning as an emotional matter. To a Wisconsin coach, winning is a craft matter. You build it. You earn it. The scoreboard reflects the quality of the work, and if it doesn’t, you examine the work, not the scoreboard.

I am cautiously optimistic about both teams. I am cautiously optimistic about this town’s sports future in a way that I have not been cautiously optimistic about a sports town in a long time, because most sports towns I cover have accumulated the weight of expectation and disappointment that makes optimism feel like a civic duty rather than an honest assessment. Here, the optimism is just honest. These teams might be good. They might not be. Tonight and tomorrow, we find out.

Twenty-two years of sports coverage has taught me one reliable fact: the teams you think will be good often aren’t, and the teams you cannot predict are the ones that give you the stories worth telling for years afterward. I do not know what these teams will be. That is, genuinely, the best thing I can say about them.

Puck drops at 7:30 tonight. Kickoff at 7 tomorrow. Both of those events are, at the moment I am writing this, in the future. By the time you read this, they will be in the past, and the first entry in the file will exist. Something will have happened, and I will have been there, and the story will have begun.

I have been covering sports for twenty-two years. This is still the most interesting day I have had on the beat.

— Don Pavalko
Sports Columnist, The Internet Tribune
September 11, 2026

The Scoreboard Sermon appears in this space every Thursday. Reach Don Pavalko at [email protected]. Don Pavalko Jr. handles radio play-by-play on WTRB 1580 AM. They are related. They have discussed it.