Saturday night – Date Night. And what does a hopeless romantic who also happens to be a Sports Fan suggest?

Me: “Honey, how about a high school volleyball championship double-header?”

The Bird: “Oh what the hell – why not.”

I took that as a ringing endorsement of the idea, and off we went to the CIF Southern Section Championships. Yesterday’s report from the front line of sports featured the loud and rowdy Division 4 title game won by El Segundo over Torrance South, and after a quick bite we were back at Cypress College for The Big One – the Division 1 championship match.

Boy’s volleyball is big in SoCal, and nowhere is it bigger than at Mira Costa and Loyola High Schools. This is a rivalry to match the Lakers & Celtics, the Yankees & Red Sox, the Angels & the A’s (OK, maybe that last one is just Big to me). Both Mira Costa High School and Loyola High School, located just 20 miles from each other, perennially occupy spots in the top five in national volleyball rankings.

Mira Costa is located in Manhattan Beach, the epicenter of the beach volleyball scene and home of the Nivea AVP Tour. They have a recent history that includes six Southern Section titles, and boast four players who had already received scholarships to play for collegiate powerhouses Stanford (defending national champ), Penn State (national runner-up), UCLA (perennial national power), and Princeton. That’s four players on one team who were, for all intents and purposes already playing a college level game. And Loyola matched them pound for pound and inch for inch. Did I mention that Loyola is the defending Southern Section and SoCal Regional champion? These teams are, um, familiar with one another.

If underdog exuberance carried the moment in the D4 title contest, it was sheer presence that greeted us when we went across campus to Cypress College’s main gym for the Division 1 championship. Despite being almost 30 minutes early, we had to sandwich ourselves into a section of the Mira Costa bleachers that was as far as you could possibly be from the action. In looking across the court it appeared that, had we been desirous of a seat in the Loyola stands…well, that just plain wouldn’t have happened. Some basic counting and sub-quantum mathematics led us to estimate that the gym held about 2,500 comfortably – or about 300 people more than that if people were willing to be uncomfortable. Clearly on this night they were. And soccer’s Premiere League crowds had nothing on this one in terms of fan involvement and sheer ingenuity in mocking the opposing team and fans.

Right away it was obvious that this was going to be a different kind of volleyball than what we’d seen in the previous game. The starting Mira Costa and Loyola blockers and hitters were bigger than the front line of the vast majority of small college basketball teams. Come to think of it they were taller than many mid-major college basketball teams. Those additional few inches of height made the game that they played altogether different than the Division 4 game we had witnessed earlier. When these players were at full leap, the angle with which they were striking the ball on a kill was almost straight down, making it next to impossible for the opponent to successfully dig – unless they happened to be lying on the floor and had the ball take a fortunate bounce off of their body. Which by the way, would’ve been my strategy.

While this type of power release was awesome to behold, at the beginning of the match it actually detracted somewhat from the sheer drama that accompanied almost every point played between El Segundo and Torrance South. Early on, the sequence of play was this: Serve, bump, set, kill – with the kill shot either finding the floor in bounds or out, or most commonly, bouncing off of an opponent and sailing out of play. Successful blocks were rare because they required the blocker to contact the ball flush with both arms, or the sheer force of the shot would cause it to careen away wildly. Points came quickly and predictably, and I was concerned that this would be the case the entire game. As the night wore on and the players began to tire though, rallies became longer and more intense, and the crowd got even louder.

Despite its current status as crown-chaser, Mira Costa was cocky. They had played Loyola during the regular season at a neutral site, and won in three straight games – but by the narrowest of margins: 25-22, 25-23 and 25-23. While Loyola is the defending champion, they’d clearly been frustrated by Mira Costa, and they hadn’t exactly breezed their way into this final. It took a Herculean comeback in five games just to escape the quarter-final round of these playoffs. If it is possible for one of the Top 10 teams in the nation to be in the role of David, they clearly were that to Mira Costa’s Goliath.

And when Mira Costa won the first game again by 25-23, you got the feeling that Loyola was just never going to get over that hump. That’s why, when they pulled out an extended second game 27-25, a huge wave of emotion washed over the Loyola stands. On the Mira Costa side of the gym there was, well…disorientation. They had only lost one of their 34 matches this year, and it was a distant early-season memory. What’s more, they hadn’t lost a single game in their march through the playoffs. They had literally swept their way into these finals. So to stand tied at one game apiece…well this was difficult to process. And it got more difficult when a now emboldened Loyola began to swarm like lobbyists on an undecided politician. They took the third game 25-20 and really made a statement at 25-16 to win game four and wrap up the championship.

And barely moments after the final point had been secured, the once-cocky Mira Costa fans had to endure the most diabolically polite of insults from the Loyola crowd – a full-throated chant of “DRIVE-home-SAFE-ly, DRIVE-home-SAFE-ly”. How thoughtful of the Loyola faithful to concern themselves with the well-being of their adversaries.