Ben Franklin once said: “Late to bed, early to rise ... is the reality of the WIAA Division 1 state team wrestling tournament.”

Well, maybe he didn’t say it quite that way. But it’s still a reality, and one for which Wisconsin Rapids was better prepared than Tomah. Wisconsin Rapids, after all, has done the 7 p.m. Friday quarterfinal/9 a.m. Saturday semifinal routine 12 straight times, dating back to 1995.

Tomah experienced all the ups and downs of high school wrestling last weekend in Madison. The Indians defeated Mukwonago, 31-29, Friday night and got whacked, 54-4, the next morning by Wisconsin Rapids.

Fourteen hours isn’t much time to recover from a wrestling match, either physically or emotionally. Ben Haines, the only Tomah winner against Wisconsin Rapids, said he didn’t sleep well the night before.

Me neither, Ben. All of us -- wrestlers, parents, fans, reporters -- were still jacked up from Friday night, and motels aren’t the greatest places to sleep anyway. I felt like a zombie walking toward the Field House Saturday morning (I hope I didn’t sound like one on the radio).

Yes, Wisconsin Rapids got up early, too. But Wisconsin Rapids has done it before. Tomah hasn’t. Tomah will be better prepared next time.

*The biggest factor in Friday’s quarterfinal was the unknown. Tomah didn’t know anything about Mukwonago. Mukwonago didn’t know anything about Tomah.

That’s why senior Kevin Sullivan’s match was so important.

Sullivan, Tomah’s 119-pounder, took a 26-8 record against Nick Mayenschein (32-10) in the evening’s first mystery match. Everyone expected Mukwonago’s state champion 103-pounder Chad Leviner to beat Kevin Betthauser (although Betthauser saved Tomah a point by not getting pinned), and Tomah’s Brandon Music (10-3) was expected to pin Patrick Sloan (8-12). The Sullivan-Mayenschein match was the equivalent of returns from Ohio on election night. And while CBS News wasn’t ready to project Tomah the winner after Sullivan earned a surprisingly easy 7-0 decision, it convinced me that I would be at the Field House again Saturday morning.

*Saw a couple of old friends this weekend.

I sat with Baraboo wrestling coach Mike McGann for the last four Tomah-Mukwonago matches (including Tyler Eckelberg’s tactically brilliant loss at 215; it’s all explained in the main wrestling article). I’ve known McGann for 25 years (we’re both Baraboo High School graduates), and he coaches my second-favorite wrestling team.

Another old friend: The University of Wisconsin Field House. Gosh, I miss that place. I probably saw 20 Wisconsin Badger basketball games in the old barn, a dozen state wrestling tournaments, and, of course, Tomah’s 1994 trip to the state basketball tournament.

If you could get a good seat (a really big “if”), there was no better place to watch a basketball game. Back in the Steve Yoder era, when it was possible to get tickets, I went to four or five games a year and could get seats in the first six rows of the upper deck between the baskets. There isn’t a seat in the Kohl Center that’s better than ones I got at the Field House.

But the Field House has another edge: character. The Kohl Center may be new and shiny, but the place reeks of money. The big shots cocoon themselves from the masses in their luxury boxes, a feature wonderfully absent at the Field House. I know I’m hopelessly backward on these things, but the old barn represented college sports before they became a full-time money-grubbing machine.

P.S. - I don’t like the new Camp Randall either. The luxury boxes block my view of Lake Monona from Section BB.

*Readers like to speculate which sport I like best. I like them all; if I didn’t, I would be in another line of work. However, I will admit to this: There is no sport in which I get more emotionally invested than wrestling. I get a knot in my stomach watching the close matches even though I’ve never wrestled competitively. Perhaps it’s because I’ve gotten to know so many of the wrestling parents (I had just started at the Tomah Journal when Mike and Linda Barta were expecting Adam). Or maybe I’ve gotten swept up in the recent success of the team. Or maybe it’s because I’ve witnessed so many close, dramatic matches involving Tomah wrestlers the past three years.

But there’s something else: the pure human drama of basic one-on-one competition. A year ago, I wrote a column about boxing as an “essence sport,” and the same thing applies to wrestling. These kids train hard, follow disciplined diets and put themselves on the line during competition in a manner unmatched by any other sport. I have tremendous respect for what these kids do.

Congratulations on a great season, Tomah wrestlers. Hope to see you at the Field House again next year.

Steve Rundio is the sports editor of the Tomah Journal and Tomah Monitor-Herald.