Keep a good thing going.

Wiscasset and Boothbay Region schools have tried a bunch of times in recent years to band together on sports teams, sometimes successfully. Cross-country, soccer and swimming have each combined; Boothbay and Wiscasset have been excellent partners, Wiscasset schools' athletic director Warren Cossette told us.

So to have no Boothbay players attend Wiscasset’s soccer practice June 18 was too bad, I thought. Let's hope some still join.

Enrollment is a challenge, so getting sufficient rosters is, and getting competitive teams is. There are exceptions like the amazing championship the Seahawk girls basketball team accomplished this year. But overall, Wiscasset and Boothbay would seem to stand a greater chance of having seasons, and having competitive ones, if they stood together.

Let's support the local schools by encouraging strength in numbers. Better for everyone. And better than watching one, the other, or eventually, potentially, both fade into Maine's school sports history.

A couple years ago, Wiscasset expected to cancel high school baseball, then came through with a junior varsity team. What a shame if sports become a maybe rather than a tradition generations and sets of siblings can look forward to, one after another in a family.

Combinations like the soccer, cross-country and swimming ones, the Morse-Wiscasset wrestling one that gave Wiscasset’s Sam Strozier a way to wrestle for a team his senior year, and this year Josie Harrington of Woolwich’s Chop Point School getting to train with Wiscasset track and field en route to her Class C state high jump title, are good for all the schools involved and their athletes.

Working together can make the impossible possible – a beloved school sport saved, or a would be student-athlete into one.

So keep trying, Boothbay and Wiscasset, with each other as a natural sports fit geographically, and keep trying with other neighboring schools, to meet students' interests and talents, whatever the jerseys read, and no matter the wins and losses.

It's still a win-win.

Week’s positive parting thought: Kudos to the intersection full of motorists at Routes 1 and 27 in Wiscasset Saturday afternoon, who let a line of fowl, ducklings it looked to me, cross under a Route 1 set of green lights.

No bottleneck was underway, not even close. So for all those people, and the one who got out and guided the pavement-colored birds across, to pause to save a half dozen or so lives was a nice sight and a reminder a wondrous, kind moment can happen anytime.