The visiting coach had spent an hour and a half ragging on the referees. In the end, he cost his team the opportunity to win the game.

A couple of points, first. This isn’t a sports column, but it uses sports as an entry because little reveals character better than sports. Second, coaches are paid to be leaders, not showoffs. And a third point. A big part of what ails America is the replacement of leadership by showmanship.

Let me explain. Last Saturday at Standish, the St. Joseph’s College Monks played the Albertus Magnus College Falcons in women’s basketball. St. Joe’s won after trailing by 13 points.

But it was tied at 65 with 3.2 seconds left when an Albertus Magnus player fouled St. Joe’s top scorer of the day, Angelica Hurley. The Albertus coach, J.R. Fredette, kept yelling at the officials.

Fredette got into the ref’s face, literally, and the ref made a T sign with his hands, which meant technical foul, assessed for degrading the game’s decorum. It also meant St. Joe’s got two more free throws, for a total of four, and possession of the ball after the free throws.

With only two free throws for Hurley, the Falcons had had a (slim) chance to tie or win. But with four free throws plus ball possession, she needed hit only one of four and St. Joe’s could stand still with the ball for 3.2 seconds. She hit three, and St. Joe’s won, 68-65.

Forgive that sports reporting, but it sets the scene for points I want to make about leadership.

Fredette was not a leader. He was a showman. Yes, officials make lousy calls. Yes, teams can get hurt by those calls. But yelling at referees doesn’t make them better. (I’ve seen 1,500 games since 1997, and only one was decided by a ref’s lousy call.)

Fredette should have apologized to his players after the game for failing to lead. Based on what I saw, though, I doubt he did.

In the larger world of politics and government, we have a long-running trend of people who should be leaders opting instead to be showpeople. None more so, perhaps, than our former governor, Paul LePage.

He came into office in 2011 with Republican majorities in both houses of the Legislature, 78-71-2 in the House of Representatives and 19-15-1 in the Senate. So, even if the independents voted with the Democrats, as they often did, he had the votes to put through a program.

LePage did accomplish a little: He paid off the state debt to its hospitals, he added to support for all education and he put through a small cut in the income tax rate, but with no change in brackets, so working Mainers kept paying more than Vermonters, e.g.

With those majorities, LePage could have reshaped state government to do fewer things and do them better. That’s why in the Republican primary in 2010, I voted for Peter Mills. He saw that Maine’s government was stretched beyond our means to pay, and he wanted to restructure it.

But from the git-go, LePage was more interested in making waves than in making life better for Mainers. He squandered both the Republican majorities and his own compelling story of pulling himself up from the streets of Lewiston into a successful corporate honcho. He preferred to snarl and jab at everyone he disliked, including Republican legislators who had helped put through some of his ideas.

Showmanship over leadership. What a pity.

At the federal level, we crossed the line years ago between showmanship and leadership. Nearly every day, our should-be leaders in each party try to score points against the other party instead of points for the American people. I’ll bet you can think up a dozen examples in 10 seconds.

Despite all this, I see three tiny glimpses of looming leadership.

In the U.S. Congress, two positive developments. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democrats have crafted a debt ceiling bill to keep the government open through the winter. Bear in mind that Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, lost the speaker job for working with the other side.

Based on what little I had known about Johnson, I hadn’t expected him to stand up to the Cuckoo Caucus that ran McCarthy out of town. Predictably, the cuckoos are already carping about Johnson’s willingness to work for the people.

Catherine Rampell wrote on Wednesday in the Sun Journal about leadership over showmanship. Members of each party are working on a bill to meet seemingly opposite goals. It would make permanent some temporary corporate tax benefits while extending an expired child tax credit.

Third example. The presidential campaign began with at least 12 Republicans seeking the party nomination. Of the dozen, only three were seriously interested in leadership: Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina; Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey; and Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas. Christie and Hutchinson have dropped out.

Three of the early 12 remain, including Haley. The other two, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, are just blowhards who want to soothe their bloated egos.

The odds of compromise on the debt ceiling and on corporate taxes/child tax credit are better than the odds of Haley becoming president. But at least one serious person remains in the race.

Bob Neal doesn’t support Nikki Haley for president, but he might vote for her in the March primary just because she’s serious about leadership and not in it just for the show. Neal can be reached at [email protected].