Last month, we told you about a contest cooked up by John Millea, the publicist for the Minnesota State High School League, in which he seeded what he determined to be the best 64 prep nicknames into an NCAA-style bracket.
And the winner of the best Minnesota high school nickname contest is ...
Started as a way to fill the void in the spring's lack of high school sports, the Minnesota State High School League's nickname challenge gave its followers a shining month of fun.
July 1, 2020 at 5:20PM
It was a cyberspace surrogate for the spring tournament season that would have wrapped up a couple of weeks ago.
And the question we asked at the time was: Can anyone knock off the Awesome Blossoms of Blooming Prairie?
The answer is yes.
The Moorhead Spuds edged the Awesome Blossoms, getting 50.4% of the 6,872 ballots cast in the title match-up. The lobbying on both sides was frenetic as the final minutes of the contest ticked off Wednesday morning on Twitter.
There were also history lessons in addition to the suspense:
Perhaps the best way to capture the ebb-and-flow of the event is to scroll back through Millea's Twitter feed, which included the brackets and results of all of the match-ups from his four 16-team regions. (Moorhead and Blooming Prairie were top seeds in their respective regions, and the other schools who made the Final Four were the Thief River Falls Prowlers and Two Harbors Agates.)
And, yes, there was a request to end Millea's nickname madness in a similar fashion to the NCAA's March Madness.
The request was granted, thanks to the Moorhead Orchestra.
Six players plus head coach Garrett Raboin and assistant coach Ben Gordon are from Minnesota. The tournament’s games will be televised starting Monday.
