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Cheers & Jeers

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Cheers & Jeers

CHEERS: Cheers to two local teams for showing their mettle by bouncing back from heartbreaking defeats with huge postseason victories. Frazier’s top-seeded girls volleyball team suffered a disappointing 3-0 loss to Greensburg Central Catholic on Saturday in the WPIAL Class A final, playing one of its worst matches of the year against a team it had beaten twice during the regular season. Just three days later the Lady Commodores found themselves on a long bus ride Tuesday night to play at District 10 champion Saegertown in the first round of the PIAA tournament. Coach Mandy Hartman’s squad was able to set aside the loss to the Lady Centurions and play arguably its best match of the season, rallying from one set down to pull the upset against the Lady Panthers, 3-2, moving on to the state quarterfinals against Clarion on Saturday. California’s football team had to deal with its own gut-wrenching loss two Fridays ago, when it rallied from a three-score deficit with a late touchdown at Jefferson-Morgan but failed on a potential game-winning two-point conversion that left the Rockets victorious, 28-27, and with the Tri-County South Conference championship. Undaunted, coach Ed Woods’ Trojans, seeded only 10th by the WPIAL football pairings committee, roared back with a rousing performance against seventh-seeded Laurel, defeating the Spartans, 22-6, Friday night to advance to the district quarterfinals for the second year in a row where it now faces second-seeded and undefeated Clairton. The Tri-County South is a combined 2-6 in first-round playoffs games the past two seasons with both wins by the Trojans.

JEERS: The New York Times headline for Quincy Jones’ obituary called him, simply, a “giant of American music,” and it would be hard to argue with that assessment. In the 1980s, millions upon millions of music buyers purchased Michael Jackson’s megablockbuster “Thriller,” and the superstar-packed famine-relief single “We are the World,” both of which Jones produced. But there was more – a lot more – to Jones’ career than his extraordinarily fruitful association with Jackson. Jones, who died Sunday at age 91, was a trumpeter, arranger, composer and producer. He worked alongside giants like Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Steven Spielberg. All told, he was nominated for 80 Grammy Awards, and took home 28. Not bad for someone who grew up poor and discovered music when he broke into a recreation center looking for food and found a piano there. As his Times obituary said, Jones “took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets.”

CHEERS: In the lead-up to every election, candidates, civic-minded officials and, yes, newspaper opinion pages, remind voters that they have a say in the process and that, indeed, every vote counts. And after every election, stories inevitably crop up about a contest decided in a village by a single vote, or a tied race that needed to be decided by a coin toss. We have a version of that here in Pennsylvania right now, except on a much larger scale. Though the trajectory of the presidential race was pretty clear a few hours after the polls closed Tuesday, as of Thursday morning there was still uncertainty about whether the incumbent, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, will be holding on to the seat he first won in 2006, or he will have to surrender it to Republican Dave McCormick. Twenty-four hours ago, the Associated Press had McCormick in the lead by a little less than 30,000 votes out of more than 6 million cast, McCormick was leading by just four-tenths of a percent. The Casey campaign maintained that they would ultimately prevail on the strength of provisional ballots, and the race could well go to a recount. No matter the outcome, though, this contest demonstrates that, yes, every vote really does count.

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