The Stang Gang was nearly 200 miles from home, but for one night they made the Baker High School gym their own.

Their enthusiasm was the contagious sort that makes you want to join in, to bask in the reflected glee, even if you have no connection with what’s going on.

The Stang Gang, though, had a lot to celebrate.

And there were a lot of them to do the celebrating.

More than I might have expected considering what I know of Crane and its high school, whose fans comprise the Stang Gang.

The unincorporated community is in Harney County, about 30 miles southeast of Burns. Crane’s population is around 150.

But the high school draws its students — and thus its fans — from an area bigger than Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.

Combined.

Crane Union High School is unique in Oregon. It’s the state’s only public boarding high school.

(Several Oregon schools, including Burnt River and Huntington, have welcomed multiple foreign exchange students, in part to bolster their declining enrollments, but Crane’s boarding students are homegrown, so to speak.)

About half the 88 high school students at Crane live during the school week in a dormitory (there are two — one for girls, one for boys). It’s the only feasible way to run a school in Harney County, where some students live on ranches 100 miles away.

Students from kindergarten through eighth grade, by contrast, attend one of eight schools scattered across the vast expanses of sagebrush and rimrock that stretch across the county to the Nevada border. Those who don’t live in the neighborhood — in Harney County, where the concept of a neighborhood is rather malleable, your nearest neighbor might be as distant as, say, Baker City is from Haines — move into the dorm when they get into high school.

(The threshold is 20 miles, but exceptions can be made for students who play sports, lest they or their parents have to make too frequent dark drives through some of the most remote country in the lower 48 states.)

It was basketball that brought the Stang Gang, several hundred strong, to BHS on Saturday, March 5.

Both the Crane girls and boys teams were playing for the Class 1A state championship.

The girls were seeking their third state title under longtime coach Stub Travis, and their second in a row. The Mustangs won the 2020 title, also in the Baker gym. The 2021 tournament was canceled due to the pandemic, although Crane went undefeated during its abbreviated schedule in June 2021 and won the championship in a 16-team unofficial state tourney.

(Also played at BHS; the Mustangs, suffice it to say, do not lose often anywhere, but their record over the past three years in Baker is unblemished. And that includes upsetting the Class 4A Baker Bulldogs in December 2021.)

The Crane boys, meanwhile, were hoping to make history of a different sort, completing a perfect season at 31-0 with the school’s first boys basketball state championship. The boys coach is Eric Nichols, a 1995 Baker High School graduate, and one of the assistants, Dave Toney, is a 1980 BHS grad.

Both Crane teams — the boys playing first, the girls finishing around 10 p.m. — achieved their goal.

Which explains not only the prodigious decibel levels the Stang Gang produced, but also why, even half an hour after the girls game ended, dozens of fans, most clad in Crane’s blue and white, were still congregated on the polished floor, forming the scattered groups typical in such circumstances.

Players still clad in their uniforms posed, with varying levels of apparent patience, for photos with parents and friends.

There were hugs.

Laughter.

Not a few tears.

It was for me the quintessential high school sports tableau.

Every age class was represented.

I saw babies who surely haven’t yet smeared their face with the frosting of their first birthday cake.

And I saw beaming visages of grandparents, perhaps even great-grandparents.

They were sharing an experience that I’m certain will become part of the lore not only for the school and the community, but for the whole sprawling district, which extends from the bird-luring marshes of Malheur Lake across the glacier-gouged ramparts of Steens Mountain and the strange blankness of the Alvord Desert.

I have no doubt that decades from now, maybe during spring branding a dozen miles from the nearest patch of pavement, maybe during a Christmas gathering in a ranch house that is the only source of light in the great high desert blackness, they will reminisce about that night in the Baker gym.

They’ll talk about the key baskets.

About the teenagers, now grey-haired grandparents themselves, who cut down the nets on that March night in the waning days of the great pandemic.

About the dozens of Stang Gang members who gathered on the court during halftime to line dance — something you’re not likely to see at any other state tournament in Oregon.

I woke up, rolled over and looked at the red numbers on the clock radio.

Tried to look, anyway.

Eyes bleary with sleep don’t focus quickly.

And my eyes, afflicted as well with extreme astigmatism, don’t really focus at all without the aid of lenses.

Which I was not wearing.

But I got close enough that, by squinting, I could make out 2:51.

This disappointed me.

I generally rise a bit before 5:30, and although two and a half hours might seem a considerable span of slumber when you’re fatigued in the middle of the afternoon and pining for even a catnap, it is a less substantial interval in the ebb of night.

For some reason I wasn’t satisfied. I fumbled my glasses off the bedside table and put them on.

The truth was instantly revealed in brilliant glowing LED numerals.

12:51.

My feeble vision hadn’t picked up on that slender “1.”

I felt in that instant the sort of triumph that is all out of proportion to the situation.

I wasn’t, of course, actually getting two extra hours of sleep.

But that cold reality couldn’t dissipate the glorious warmth of the moment, the sense that I had in fact received a wondrous gift.

I rolled back over, flipped the pillow to its cool side, and relished one of those minor thrills that nobody, it seems to me, can ever have too many of.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.