Groton — It is the region’s most wonderful night, a confluence of accomplishment, inspiration, fellowship and celebration. There is grandeur, the Mystic Marriott’s ballroom. There is gentility, everyone in their Sunday best. There is nobility in the diversity, everyone together despite not all looking the same.

There is singing, everyone belting out the Star Spangled Banner before Lift Every Voice, the Black national anthem. There is gratitude, parents publicly thanked for their sacrifice and responsibility. So are teachers.

I try not to miss the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Dinner, whose 42nd rendition hit every note Thursday night. Put it this way: Many of the kids I’ve written about in sports are suddenly stylish in their speeches before 600 people. I had several “there’s something in my eye” moments throughout the evening.

And yet The Day’s thorough account of the gala barely registered a murmur among the readers. The Human Comments Section registered one. The story didn’t make the “top five most read” on theday.com, despite its front-and-center placement.

It got me thinking: Why doesn’t positive news move the metaphorical needle? Why are clicks tethered to negativity?

“Although blaming journalists and editors for bias is easy, it’s also too simple,” Derek Thompson recently wrote in the Atlantic during a lengthy piece about how negativity sells. “After all, it’s audiences who are reading — and watching, clicking, and subscribing to — all this stuff.

“Even public-service-minded editors and journalists may feel they need to shape their coverage to match the decisions and emotional dispositions of their consumers. Negativity is not, strictly speaking, a news-maker problem; it’s a human problem.”

And lest you think I’m cherry picking here — using the flawed but popular trick of citing a random example and declaring it the rule, not the exception — here is more evidence:

The online news dispensary Upworthy recently studied more than 105,000 variations of story headlines, discovering that stories with more negative terms in the headline drove more clicks, while positive terms decreased engagement, based on user response.

“Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates),” the study read. “For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3 percent.”

And we wonder why social division has replaced baseball as the national pastime? We want catastrophe, blood and damnation, not a bunch of kids at a gala showing us that as a society, we’re not actually dead yet.

But where’s the fun in that? Nah. Give us more political tribalism. We profess to despise those of different beliefs, yet instead of ignoring them, we hang on their every word.

Try it next time here in The Day. Check out the top five most-read stories and list how many positive stories actually make it. Or better: Watch how the low hanging fruit (just put the word “Trump” in a headline) remains the entree, not the appetizer.

“The big picture looks like this,” Thompson wrote. “Online news is a weird and small subset of the internet, which is driven by an even weirder and smaller set of writers and posters, who have contributed to an ecosystem in which emotionality drives sharing and negativity drives clicks.

“Okay, so what? Bad news isn’t some myth conjured into existence by traffic-chasing headline writers. Many events and trends are actually bad, and any honest news organization needs a muscle for identifying them. Scrutinizing power, corruption, and oppression on behalf of the public requires a critical lens, and suggesting that the world would be better if journalists ‘just cheered up’ is absurd.”

Here’s what concerns me though: When news outlets, chasing clicks, slant their coverage toward negativity, what Thompson calls the “bad news bias.”

“This bias, when it shows up as a tendency to sensationalize negative news while ignoring positive stories,” Thompson wrote, “can gradually desensitize audiences to truly grave issues, overwhelm people with a sense of global doom, misinform audiences about opportunities to make the world better, reduce their agency to fix solvable problems, erode trust in the general enterprise of honest news gathering, and exacerbate political and social polarization by locking audiences into a relationship with news coverage that highlights conflict.”

Alas, we are all only responsible for ourselves. And so I’ll dare to be irrelevant in The Great American Click Race and congratulate 12 pretty terrific kids, the 2023 MLK scholars:

Felix Beltre and Mackenzie Hope (Ledyard), Lexi Collins (Waterford); Sian Crespo, Gabriela Santiago Cruz, Stephanie Flores Aguilar and Ernsly Joseph (New London), Calvin McCoy III, Gianni Drab and Katheryn Regan (Fitch), Stecie Celestin (NFA) and Shay Fine (Stonington).

You are about to make our world a better place. Thank you for that. And to your parents and teachers as well.

Even if the reading public doesn’t really care.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro