Mohegan — This was a little after the final horn bellowed Sunday at Mohegan Sun Arena, the clarion that mercifully ended the Class M state championship game that wasn't really competitive post Star Spangled Banner.

Frank Lombardo, the coach of the Holy Cross girls, had just finished a radio interview and met the rest of the media gaggle, following his team's 43rd straight victory, this a 61-38 stroll over Bacon Academy.

Lombardo mentioned his program's winning streak. How the Crusaders made the state semifinals two years ago mostly as sophomores before the pandemic wiped out the state tournament. How they were undefeated last year. And how this year they came back as seniors for, as he said before the game, "a chance to show everyone out there in the state what Holy Cross basketball is all about."

Oh, they did that. And then some. Terrific team. Worthy of No. 1 votes.

But then comes another question that challenges the more global notion of equity rather than the Holy Cross program's efficacy: Why was a senior-laden team with a 16-game winning streak at the time placed in Class M and not in a bigger division?

"We're actually a Class S school," Lombardo said, "but got bumped up to M."

Here is one voice in the wilderness begging for some harder bumping in the future.

Holy Cross entered this season too good of a program to be among public schools of modest enrollments. The Crusaders beat publics Watertown, New Fairfield and Valley Regional to make the finals. Bacon defeated Griswold, Cromwell and East Hampton. That's seven public schools and Holy Cross, fodder for the old Imus In The Morning skit, "Which doesn't belong and why?"

Technically, Bacon (362 girls) is bigger than Holy Cross (195). Holy Cross is designated as a "school of choice" under CIAC rules because it "has 25 or more students enrolled of that gender from outside of its geographical area."

The placement for schools of choice is a familiar rant, gaining momentum across the state. One of the problems, echoed in several conversations at this weekend's championships, is an unwillingness to accept the premise that schools of choice have an inherent competitive advantage.

To wit: Some of us believe enrollment numbers alone should not determine state tournament divisions. It's the mechanism behind the way enrollments are formed, not the numbers themselves. A public high school and school of choice might have 300 boys apiece, for example. But if the public high school's pool of potential players comes from one town and the school of choice draws from multiple towns, the school of choice has a competitive advantage.

This is most pronounced in Class S and Class M, where the ability of choice schools to draw from multiple towns all but drowns small public high schools, whose talent pools are already limited enough and confined to town borders.

Sunday's game provided a game between Holy Cross, whose school website says "the school continues to serve families from more than 30 cities and towns. A large percentage of our students live in the Greater Waterbury area, but some travel as far as Torrington, Newtown and Southington." Bacon, meanwhile, has students travel from as far away as Halls Hill Rd.

A popular response from choice school advocates goes something like, "every school is a choice school," given that families are allowed to pay tuition to send kids to any high school in Connecticut. It's somewhere between oversimplified and disingenuous to suggest that random examples from fixed points in time qualify as the rule, rather than the exception. There may be a kid here and a kid there whose family pays tuition to attend a certain public school. Hardly the same as Fairfield Prep.

Screaming about this in the media has served to make this a more popular talking point. It's becoming more accepted that one-size-fits-all mathematical formulas for divisional placement have more rhetorical than practical usefulness. But it won't get anywhere else until superintendents, principals, athletic directors and coaches at individual schools take up the cause with earnestness and specifics.

I don't believe this is about outcomes as much as the failure to adhere to the principles of equity. But while we're here, we should mention that schools of choice won the Class M, MM and L girls' basketball titles this year. We should mention that school of choice Immaculate eliminated Old Lyme from a state tournament two weeks ago for the 10th time across two sports in recent memory.

This will keep happening until somebody — more likely somebodies — mount an offense. Example: East Catholic, unbeaten in 2021 and last season's unanimous No. 1 team in the final state baseball poll, moves down from Class M to Class S this year. East still has a shortstop going to Maryland and pitcher going to St. John's. And will compete for a trophy with Wheeler, Tourtellotte, Wamogo, Shepaug Valley and Parish Hill.

Note to some enterprising administrators at Class M and Class S schools: You better start speaking up soon.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro