Reece Dixon walked across the nearly empty parking lot at the Baker High School gymnasium.

The hero, like a character in a novel, was alone as he strode across the blacktop to his car.

Dixon, the senior point guard for the Powder Valley Badgers, avoided the patches of ice and crusty snow outside the gym as deftly as he had navigated the Baker Bulldog defense inside the building earlier on the evening of Saturday, Feb. 5.

He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt despite the 15-degree early February chill.

No coat.

Apparently Dixon is as impervious to an Eastern Oregon winter as he is to pressure on the basketball court.

I happened to be leaving the gym just after Dixon.

And as I watched him walk, it struck me that this brief scene, so different from what had just happened inside, where it was bright and warm and the bleachers were packed with rowdy fans, better captured the essence of small town high school basketball than that evocative, but also clichéd, tableau.

Barely half an hour earlier, Dixon made the game-winning 3-point shot with about 4 seconds left on the clock.

It was the sort of shot that almost every basketball player at some point imagines pulling off. Think of a kid in a driveway or barnyard, shooting at a hoop bolted to a pole or above the garage door, daydreaming about the elation that would come with watching the ball slip crisply through the nylon net, and seeing the numbers on the scoreboard reflect the sudden, exhilarating shift from defeat to victory.

Dixon had just lived what is, for most players, forever a fantasy.

And yet here he was, while the adrenaline must still have been coursing through his system, getting ready to drive home.

No postgame press conferences.

No gantlet of autograph seekers.

(Although I wouldn’t be surprised if a few Badgers asked Dixon to scrawl his name on a handy scrap of paper.)

Probably the same typical Saturday night awaited the other Bulldogs and Badgers who, along with Dixon, had just given several hundred fans such a thrilling evening of entertainment and spirited competition.

I thought of Dixon’s teammate Kaden Krieger, who scored 30 points — half of them in the first quarter alone as the Badgers made it clear that they weren’t intimidated by Baker’s 15-3 record.

Cole Martin scored all seven of his points in the crucial fourth quarter. Kaiden Dalke had 13 points.

There were heroic plays aplenty among the Bulldogs, too, of course.

Isaiah Jones contorted himself in a way that would leave me aching for a week en route to a one-handed layin — his off hand, the left, no less — that gave Baker what seemed, briefly, to be a decisive 63-57 lead midway through the fourth quarter.

Hudson Spike somehow spun the ball with the perfect velocity to kiss it off the backboard and into the hoop on a reverse layin.

And he tossed the inbounds pass to Paul Hobson, who eluded all five Badgers to get into the key for a layin, and then made a pressure-packed free throw with 14.1 seconds left to give Baker the 2-point lead that Dixon would erase not long after.

Surely it was one of the more exciting games played in the Baker gym in decades.

Yet the stakes were not the ones most often associated with the kind of nailbiting finish that Powder Valley’s 69-68 win produced.

This wasn’t a state tournament or playoff game. The winner wasn’t going to be awarded a shiny trophy.

Indeed, Baker and Powder Valley likely won’t ever compete against each other for those accolades or the associated hardware.

Baker is a Class 4A school, a classification with an enrollment range from 350 to 664.

Powder Valley is a member of Class 1A, reserved for Oregon’s smallest high schools, with an enrollment below 90.

Class 1A schools rarely compete against Class 4A schools.

But the rivalry between the Bulldogs and the Badgers, if not a traditional one, is certainly enticing in a geographic and cultural sense.

The schools, after all, are just 20 miles apart. And many of the players, and students, know each other.

The match up isn’t feasible in every sport.

In football, most notably, as Baker plays the standard 11-man format while Powder Valley puts eight players on the field.

Yet as Powder coach Kyle Dixon told me after the Feb. 5 game, on the basketball court this has turned into a compelling rivalry.

I hope it continues as an annual event — ideally with the teams, both boys and girls, playing both in Baker and in North Powder.

I doubt, though, that this will ever become the antagonistic sort of rivalry that we tend to associate with sports — Ducks vs. Beavers, Red Sox vs. Yankees.

Here’s why:

Three nights after Dixon’s epic 3-pointer, he was back in the Baker gym.

But he wasn’t in uniform.

He wasn’t even wearing the Badgers’ blue and red.

Dixon was in fact clad in the purple and gold of Baker High.

He was standing in the BHS student section, not 15 feet from where he let go of the game-winner that they’ll be talking about in North Powder for years.

He had a purple pom pom in one hand.

Dixon, the conqueror of Bulldogs, standing among them, rooting them on against La Grande.

Not as memorable, perhaps, as a 3-pointer with the game on the line.

But it was quite a scene just the same.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.