There was a palpable buzz that permeated throughout the Owatonna wrestling community leading into last Friday’s dual.

In the first two months of the season, The Huskies had hosted just one home competition and fans were pining to get another look at their favorite team and check out the first “spotlight” dual at the new Federated Gymnasium.

The excitement stretched beyond just the wrestling circles as well. This is Owatonna, after all. Wrestling is woven the very fabric of the community and established a flourishing culture.

And then you have the other side of the spectrum, the Winona Winhawks.

To proclaim that wrestling is treated differently in Winona’s neck of the woods compared to how it is in Owatonna would be the understatement of the century. The contrast is actually rather staggering.

This year epitomizes this chasm.

The Winhawks came into last week’s dual 0-7 having been outscored by a hefty 56 points point per match. As lop-sided as things looked on paper, local fans would soon find out just how dire the situation is for their Big Nine Conference counterpart.

But as disappointing as it was from a competitive standpoint, it reminded me just how unique the the Owatonna wrestling program is from top-to-bottom. This is a community where kids go from shedding diapers one day, to getting fitted for their first singlet the next. Participation is healthy at all age levels and overseen by a dynamic organization that binds it all together.

In Winona, it’s a completely different story. Heck, it’s a completely different reality.

The issues faced by the high school team aren’t simply a byproduct of a few small classes or a couple down cycles. The challenges penetrate every level of the program are specifically endemic on a larger scale.

Allow me to elaborate.

I spent the first 23 years of my life in Winona and was involved in sports as a spectator, player and coach from the youth ranks all the way up to college and wrestling was never part of the equation for me. Nor was it for most of my peers.

The concept of hanging out on a school night and attending a wrestling just wasn’t what the people did, save the small group of people directly associated with the team.

It’s not that wrestling had a bad reputation. It’s that is had no reputation.

In a city where three high schools and two university athletics departments all content for what is a finite surplus of resources and support, the high school wrestling program is in a particularly daunting situation.

This dichotomy has prevailed for a long, long time and something I became acutely familiar with during my tenure as a part-time sports reporter at the Winona Daily News from 2005 t 2007. Print journalism was in a much different place back then and daily publications actually possessed the means to build a somewhat robust and functional editorial staff.

At the Daily News in particular, the sports department alone featured multiple full-time editors, numerous beat reporters, a full-time photographer and several part-time writers.

When I first started, my duties mainly consisted of sitting at a desk on busy nights, answering phone calls and hammering out short game recaps on a tight deadline. Eventually I gained enough experience and was given regular assignments’ outside he office. As the low reporter on the totem pole, this usually meant covering the sports on the bottom of the pecking order.

And yet in two years at the Daily News, I was never asked to cover a single wrestling match in person. And that’s because no one did. It was a business decision by the managing editors. To them, it didn’t justify the ink.

After what I witnessed last Friday, it appears as though the Winhawks wrestling program has somehow found a way to regress in the 20 years since I last lived in Winona.

It wasn’t that long ago when Ryan Henningson was winning a state championship for the Winhawks and taking his talents to the Division I level. Even back in my high school days, a guy named Max Lossen took home a heavyweight state title in 2001 and signed with Michigan State.

But a few high-achieving individuals isn’t enough to move the needle against programs like OHS. I can’t even venture a guess as to the last time the Winhawks beat the Huskies in wrestling, but I can tell you that it hasn’t happened since at least 2012 when I rolled into town. I suppose, Owatonna’s 26-1 lead in overall Big Nine Conference titles sums it up nicely. Oh, and for the record, Winona’s lone conference championship came 38 years ago…and was split with two other teams…one of which was Owatonna.

The matchup between the teams has gotten so unbalanced that the chief narrative surrounding the annual dual concerns just how absurd it is that one of the teams spends three hours on a bus shuttling-to-and-from the opposing school for a competition that lasts a small fraction of that time.

On Friday, it took less than 30 minutes.

Despite what I knew was destined to be a lop-sided affair, I took my son along and gave him a taste of what it was like to watch the sport in person.

Ironically, I also witnessed something I’d never seen before: Winona filled exactly three weight classes against the Huskies.

Yes, you read that correctly. Three.

In all my years covering the sport and watching it as a fan, I’ve seen a few small Class A schools forfeit upwards of 50% of weights due to lack of numbers, but what Winona did on Friday was a new record high in my book.

Of the trifecta of matches that took place, I can remember at least one Owatonna pin, though there might have a second. Admittedly, the three trips to the concession stand, two bathroom breaks and one lap around the track keeping up with an energetic three-year-old required the bulk of my attention.

And it was the perfect night out.

There I was, spending quality time with my son and soaking in as much of the little moments as I possibly could. Though much of the actual wrestling flew right over the little guy’s head, he maintained a twinkle in his eye that I won’t soon forget. It was priceless.

There are plenty of former versions of myself that would have guessed this is where I’d be at this age.

I mean, the chances of my parents taking me to a high school wrestling match when I was three years old would have been about as likely as them taking me to Woodstock.

It’s just a fact. For whatever reason, wrestling simply wasn’t something my parents were exposed to at a young age and, thus, it wasn’t something they passed along their children.

However, I do like to remind my mom about how she stole my chance at grappling glory when she famously scoffed at the suggestion that I give the sport a try by my second grade gym teacher after my burgeoning mat skills were put on full display during “wrestling week” at St. Mary’s Primary School.

I’ve have since forgiven my mother and ultimately spent the first 20-plus years of my life having gained little more than a superficial grasp of wrestling, and that might be generous.

That all changed when I moved to Owatonna .

This community — and this wrestling program — can have that effect on people.

It wasn’t until I received some rather poignant feedback regarding a short wrestling article that I wrote during my first few weeks at the Owatonna People Press when I started to grasp the sheer magnitude of how revered the sport of wrestling is in this town. At the time, the criticism was definitely painful, but warranted.

Looking back, the incident also served as a pivotal learning experience on a number of fronts. Over time, I gradually started to educate myself on the sport on all things wrestling because, quite frankly, I didn’t really have much of a choice. Bottom line, if I was going to stick around as a member of the local sports media, I was going to cover a lot of wrestling.

Well, it’s been more than a decade and I’m still here. I’m still writing about local sports. And Owatonna wrestling is still firmly woven into the fabric of this community.

And somehow this journalist who couldn’t tell the difference between blood time and riding time is now slightly obsessed with the sport and spending his free time absorbing as much of it as he can.

It’s wrestling. It’s culture. It’s community.