While teams are still fighting to be crowned state champion in their respective classifications, Thursday night marked the end of high school basketball season in Dallas County.

And while none of the county’s teams were able to advance past the regional semifinals, it was still a season filled with success and excitement for the Selma area.

Defeat in the regional playoffs revealed positive developments in the area’s local athletic programs.

Five teams from Dallas County (Selma High School boys and girls, Keith High School girls, Dallas County boys and Southside girls) made it to the regional tournaments in Mobile and Montgomery.

Not many counties can claim such an achievement, and most of those counties that can are larger metropolitan areas, such as Mobile and Birmingham, that have populations ten times or more larger than Dallas County.

It’s an achievement that reflects positively on the depth of talent in Dallas County.

Looking back on my first year covering high school basketball as a whole, I came in not knowing what to expect.

However, the very first game I covered — Keith versus Francis Marion — set the tone for the entire season, with a finish that ended on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer.

I covered dozens of games and witnessed at least five shots determine the victor as time expired.

But even when games weren’t determined on the final basket, they were usually determined in the final few minutes of the game.

Standing-room only crowds often packed into local gyms to see the county’s intense rivalries, whether they were between two schools from the county or city of Selma, or between a local team and a rival from a neighboring county.

Close games, exciting finishes and energetic crowds were a routine occurrence this season, but it’s a routine that never got old, as moments in games this year could elicit a reaction out of the most uninvested and unbiased observer.

As a journalist, one of the first things you’re taught is to be without bias.

Being from Mobile, Dallas County’s teams were unfamiliar and made being unbiased or objective an easy task.

However, the exciting nature of high school basketball in the area often had me saying one word that can sum up the year as a whole — ‘Wow.’