Eight happy thoughts or recollections about the high school basketball tournament, for which the brackets will be announced on Friday:

1. I NEEDED TO KNOW. When I was a youngster, my high school basketball team never made the tournament. In fact, it was in the midst of a 30-year drought of non-qualification, but as a budding young sportswriter for the local weekly, I wanted to experience first-hand the excitement of postseason play.

So, one evening in February 1971, I got into my 1963 VW Beetle and drove to the West Junior High School in Brockton to watch a Tech Tourney game between Case High of Swansea and what was then called Lawrence High School of Falmouth. Talk about your "Hoosiers" atmosphere - small gym (the new Brockton High was not yet open), huge crowd, no ventilation, players wearing uniforms without the school names on the front. I had no idea what was going on most of the time.

And I loved it. I don't remember the final score, but I knew at that moment that a lasting appreciation for tournament basketball had been born.

2. WHEN IT FINISHES WELL. My first exposure to a state championship came in 1987, when the North Attleboro High School girls' team advanced all the way to the Division 2 title game at the then-Worcester Centrum to play Athol. The Rocketeers were an outstanding and close-knit team, anchored by seniors Alyssa Gutauskas, Heidi Deppisch and Stephanie Cooper and sophomore Rachael Routhier, and as expected, they rolled to victory. Upon catching up with the girls near their locker room after the game, I and news-side reporter Gloria LaBounty found them weeping uncontrollably. You'd have thought they had lost the game, but those were tears of unbridled joy running down their cheeks.

"This is the best moment of our lives, and I don't want it to end," Gutauskas said through her tears. In my memory, it never will.

3. TOURNAMENT READY. Ironic it was that I read in Saturday's paper James Schneider's account of the Foxboro High girls' game against Sharon, in which the Warriors' head coach, Sarah Behn, had to scold her team at halftime for not being "tournament ready." If there's anyone who should know what that means, it's Behn.

I recall an early-round game against Bishop Stang at the Warriors' gym about 20 years ago. Behn, regarded as the best player in the state at the time, was sick as the proverbial dog with the flu and had struggled mightily in the first half.

After another bout with her digestive tract in the locker room at halftime, Behn quickly showed what being "tournament ready" was all about at the start of the third quarter by throwing in one of the best baskets I ever saw, a prayer of a heave from the right baseline, behind the basket, as she was being hammered out of bounds by a Stang defender.

The tournament is a time when players need to be prepared to exceed their expectations and their limitations.

4. THE BEST BASKET. Among all the great players who've graced our hardcourts locally, the distinction of "best tournament basket I've ever seen" goes to Foxboro High's Haley Fox, daughter of former Patriot safety Tim Fox.

In a game at Massasoit Community College (I believe against Archbishop Williams, although the memory is a little foggy), Fox was trying to save the ball from going out of bounds off the right baseline. She scooped it in an around-her-back motion and it went straight up in the air in the direction of the basket - swish! Nothing but net.

5. SAD LESSON LEARNED. As I mentioned before, my alma mater, Mansfield High, went nearly 30 years without qualifying for the boys' basketball tournament. And it took the state's disastrous experiment with an "open" tournament to get the Hornets in.

In the 1991-92 season, the Hornets under coach Stu Hershman had posted one of their best records in decades, 15-5. But in this particular season, the MIAA decided to take a page out of the Indiana book and send everyone to the tournament regardless of record. Because of that, the Hornets had to wait for nearly a week for their first game while all of the preliminary games were gotten out of the way - and then, according to the rules of the tournament, their game had to be played at a neutral site. So, by the time Mansfield played Sharon at Wheaton College's Emerson Gym, there was about an inch of rust on the Hornets - and they promptly lost to a team they had beaten twice in the regular season.

The "open tournament" lasted only two seasons. It was a good idea for the King Philip boys, who caught fire in both tournaments despite their poor records and advanced for a few rounds before the deeper teams ousted them. It was a bad idea for North Attleboro, which declined to send either its boys or its girls on to the playoffs because those teams had not reached the previous 59-percent qualification mark.

6. A STAR IS BORN. When Seekonk High's Kim Lynch first became a varsity player as a freshman, she was listed as 5 feet tall (and was probably closer to 4-foot-10), but she could crank up the big shot. In a state semifinal at the old Boston Garden, Lynchie knocked down seven three-pointers to send her Warriors on to its first of three trips to Worcester, and the TV crews and the metro columnists simply fell in love with the engaging mighty mite.

Lynch is the classic example of an athlete who may have been of short stature, but had a competitive nature the size of Texas. She led her team into three state championship games in two different divisions, she scored 1,728 career points, and she went on to start every single game of her college career at Holy Cross and play more minutes than any other player in Crusaders' history. If there's anyone who got more out of her talent than Kim Lynch over her basketball career, I haven't met him or her.

7. A STAR IS BORN, PART 2: I could probably fill a book with Sarah Behn anecdotes, but this is still my favorite.

It's Behn's freshman year, and the Warriors are playing North Attleboro in a sectional semifinal at Massasoit. Late in the game, Behn is fouled and has to attempt free throws that will decide the outcome. She steps to the line, and before the crucial shot, the lights in the gymnasium flicker as if a power outage is about to ensue. Totally oblivious to the flickering lights, Behn sinks the free throw and Foxboro wins.

In the parking lot afterward, I and fellow reporters Peter Gobis and Bob Croce corner Behn at the Foxboro bus and ask her if she had been distracted by the flickering lights. A skeptical look crosses her face and she says, "C'mon, guys, I'm not that naïve."

She thought we were trying to pull a fast one on her. I think she still does.

8. THE WOLTERS FILES. The Wolters family of Holliston, brother Ray of Bishop Feehan and sister Kara of Holliston High, has provided a few memorable moments for local hoop fans over the years.

In a sectional final against Sharon at Matthews Arena in Boston, Ray Wolters (Bishop Feehan's center) had been taking quite a razzing from the Sharon fans throughout the game, so when he stepped to the foul line for a set of crucial free throws, he decided to let the fans know how he felt about them. As he took the ball from the official, he turned his head to the cluster of loudmouths behind the Sharon bench and blew kisses to them.

He then missed the free throws. But Feehan did win the game.

A few years later, Holliston was playing Seekonk in a girls' sectional semifinal at Massasoit. At 6-foot-4, Kara Wolters was as imposing a figure as you could find on the court, and Seekonk coach Bob Kulaga knew his team wasn't going to win the opening tap - so he sent 5-foot-nothing Kim Lynch out to jump center.

Seekonk's acquiescence unnerved Wolters, who played in a funk the whole game and had to watch the Warriors advance in the tournament. But she got over it and enjoyed great careers at the University of Connecticut and in the WNBA.

I could go on and on ... as they used to say at the start of the old TV series, "there are 8 million stories in the Naked City." These were eight of mine. This year's tournament is bound to create more.

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com. Read Farinella's blog, "Blogging Fearlessly," at thesunchronicle.com/farinella.