What About All Those Other Great Dogs and Handlers?

SUMMARY: Does 2nd Place Make Them A Loser? I think not.

I often think back to the Buffalo Bills football team in the early 1990s: They made it to the Super Bowl four years in a row. They also never won the Super Bowl during that time. But they were beaten by 3 different teams, which means that, during that time, no other team was good enough to make it to the super bowl more than once or twice. So who was the better team among those four teams?

Still, it is the winner's name who's recorded.

It's like watching the USDAA nationals final (or regionals, or whatever) year after year. Year after year you may see the same dogs and handlers in the finals, but maybe they don't always take 1st place, so when USDAA lists the results of prior years, only the 1st place teams show up, and never the other handlers and dogs. But who's the better handler/dog--one who shows up year after year in the finals (and who knows, maybe takes second place multiple times, which I know has happened), or one who wins by, jeez, it also happens, a hundredth of a second, or appears, wins, and is never seen again (hmm, not sure whether THAT really ever happens, because...)

...I don't believe there's a web site where you can see a list of names of all USDAA finalists and the years in which they were there in the finals. If anyone knows of such a place, let me know! Or if you have your own lists of finalists somewhere, maybe I can start assembling such a page. (Yeah, I think of it NOW, after not keeping lists of all the finalists for the last 16 years when I've been paying attention!)