The week’s interminable spring showers pelted the well-worn path surrounding Thompson Field at Lisbon High School, rapidly transforming the 10-foot-wide swath of sand and gravel into mud. Kitty litter, the athletes and locals affectionately call it, sometimes while cleaning the residue from open scrapes.

Undaunted, the Greyhounds’ track and field went through its routine of a collective jog after a pre-practice stretch. Same drills, different day for Lisbon, which was about 48 hours away from completing its eighth consecutive sweep of the Mountain Valley Conference championship meet this past Thursday. Every spring since 2006, both the boys’ and girls’ teams have hoisted a league trophy over huddled heads.

It’s a ridiculous run of success that makes absolutely no sense for a school Lisbon’s size, in a community with long-standing passion for football, baseball and wrestling. And even more unlikely when you consider the atmosphere in which the Greyhounds train from the first sign of snow melting in March to the final starter’s pistol in June.

Those conditions are, by any standard of comparison to other top-flight track and field programs in the state, deplorable.

“We train right here. It’s a shame,” Lisbon’s venerable coach Dean Hall said as stood on what doubles as the 10-yard-line on the football field, with no synthetic surface or white lines in sight.

For all its success in one of Maine’s most under-appreciated scholastic sports at the local level, Lisbon has never won a state championship.

“You can go back and look at several teams and say, ‘Well, that was a state championship team that never had the opportunity to train every day,’ where, oh, I don’t know, say, Falmouth, Yarmouth, NYA, places like that were,” Hall said.

Hall isn’t one to lose the glimmer in his eye or leave home without his sense of humor often. It doesn’t take a visitor to Lisbon track practice long to look around and wonder how.

For almost two years, heavy equipment has been moving earth behind Lisbon’s football, soccer and track digs. It’s all designated, eventually, as new fields for baseball, softball and field hockey. The current grass employed by those sports would be swallowed up, the locals hope and pray, by overdue school expansion.

Not to mention that the new fields are sorely needed, and surely there must be some collateral payoff for track. Right, Dean?

Crickets.

“There’s been so many committees that I’ve been on, always at the point where somebody has to go and say, ‘There is a need for half a million dollars spent by somebody to put this together.’ And you get on committees and talk about this and talk about that and the priorities are elsewhere,” Hall said. “At some point somebody’s got to pony up money.”

Ah, yes, money. Because every member of a community will wring his hands and stammer that children’s education and health are crucial … until he no longer has kids and grandkids in the school system. Then purse strings and other things suddenly get tight.

Jeff Ramich shared the room with Hall for years in one of those exploratory committees. Ramich, now the Leavitt athletic director, was Lisbon’s co-curricular coordinator at the time. He maintains that vested interest as a Lisbon track parent and taxpayer.

Twice, the committee wrote a grant that would have made the project possible.

“It was 25 pages long,” Ramich said. “We got it approved, but in both cases it was matching funds. The town would have had to come up with $250,000.”

Lisbon desperately needs a new high school. It’s easy for skeptics to label a shiny-new, prescription track surface as a luxury.

That’s where people miss the unpopular truth about high school sports — that it often teaches lessons superior in long-term importance to the ones learned in the classroom.

Perhaps nowhere is that truer than track. Not for the faint of heart, it reinforces self-discipline, health and fitness, and the invaluable life skill of finishing what you’ve started.

Hall has preached that gospel to a charismatic choir for years. He’s stopped short of passing a collection plate, although he ultimately knows that’s what it will take.

“No sugar daddies or sugar daddettes have come forward,” he said.

And so the indomitable coaching staff of Hall, Hank Fuller, Doug Sautter and Dan Sylvester schools its champions without the benefit of creature comforts.

Yes, our state’s economy remains in the tank. The life is squeezed out of every education dollar harder than ever. And you won’t find many people more opposed to tax increases or borrowing than I.

This is more than an educational or political debate. It is a community pride and community health issue. Once built, an all-season track surface serves residents from ages 6 to 106. It’s a safe place to walk, run and get moving without the danger of vehicles or the specter of membership fees.

A town as respectable and so steeped in athletic tradition as Lisbon should have a track. That it has gotten this far without one is mind-numbing.

“Overdue,” Ramich said. “And when it does happen — when, not if — it had better be named the Dean Hall Complex.”

Hall would settle for being able to hang a 2013 state championship banner over that mythical facility someday.

“In the meantime, we do what we have to do,” he said. “We take hard-working kids and make them successful.”

Reward them. Reward yourselves.

Build it, already.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.