After the oral history was written for the 2016-17 Glacier Wolfpack boys’ basketball champions, I got a little bonus in my email - the entire state title game against the Bozeman Hawks.

There’s no time or space for do-overs, but upon review a couple things really jumped out.

Mainly: That was a lot of hair.

That’s not all, of course, but let’s start there. The vantage point on the film is the top row at Four Seasons Arena in Great Falls, but even the half-blind can see Patrick O’Connell and Tadan Gilman had some serious salad.

Coach Mark Harkins said from the start it was a battle. If so it appears the kids came out on the long end.

“It goes back to the summer before that,” Harkins said last week. “We were playing a tournament in Helena and Tadan stops the game because his hair got in his eyes. We stopped the game because he had to fix his hair.”

Maybe it was the shoes, maybe it was the hair. What also showed up on tape was that final game’s tense moments weren’t limited to Jaxen Hashley’s fifth personal and subsequent technical foul.

After Bozeman hit the technical free throws – Hashley showed a lot of frustration during that untucking, but would I have called a T? No – 3:30 remained and Glacier’s lead was down to 39-38.

Bozeman had a shot to take the lead, and missed. With the score 41-40 the Hawks had three more shots: No good. Then in the final 25.4 seconds the Hawks’ Drew Huse made a basket to cut the gap to 44-42 and then – after two missed free throws by the Pack – fired up an NBA-distance three. His teammates rose off the bench… but the shot rattled out.

Only then did O’Connell salt the game away, hitting two free throws with six seconds left in a 46-42 victory.

It was Bozeman’s second straight title-game lost, and it was that close. I wasn’t there because I spent five years out of newspapers, but my pits are superheating thinking about the deadline pressure.

I might have noted that Brec Rademacher’s back-to-back threes as the Pack ran out to a 16-7 lead; or that Jack Desmul, who sent the aforementioned email, flung in one his mini-hooks to put Glacier up 35-24 late in the third quarter.

The game might have seemed in hand then; these points loomed big later.

Desmul had something else going: His hair.

“My dad was really big on his hair policy,” Caden Harkins remembered. “The night before we played Skyview (in the semifinals), our backup center Jack Desmul shows up at my room and said, ‘Hey, can you cut my hair?’

“Next thing we knew we have the whole team in the bathroom watching. We gave him probably the grossest mullet I’ve ever seen.”

Desmul had key moments in the Pack’s 48-40 win over Billings Skyview the next night. But looking three years later and from 80 feet away, I’m not sure if that trip to the team barber was necessary.

“(Coach Harkins) kind of let the long hair slide at the end, but at the beginning – he wanted us to be cleaned up,” Rademacher said.

At the end they had the flowing locks and they cleaned up on the rest of the AA.

Reporter Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 406-546-1122 or by email at fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com.