If you live in Scarborough, you are about to witness another Town-School Board budget process that will not be reminiscent of any scene from Bedford Falls in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

For cash-poor/land-rich seniors, or for Joe and Jane who scraped up their last nickels to put together money for a down payment on a little starter home, it will be more like “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Part of the property taxes assessed will be about $2.5 million for kids sports.

I support that expenditure.

(Pause at lap top; cease typing; dodge thrown vegetables; okay, resume typing).

Youth sports in a town of busy yuppies, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee for the non-couch-based physical activity you give to 3,000 or 4,000 kids annually. I love thee for the lessons about teamwork, dedication, commitment, resilience, and perspective you teach to young people who were on the Starfish or Mermaids or Salamanders soccer teams.

And, I love thee for the up-and-down-up–and-down-up–and-down melodrama world of middle school and high school sports that exists mainly to teach parents how to back off their kid and not coach anymore from the stands like it was some 7 year old’s Little League game; how to realize that little Trevor nor little Chloe are likely to play D1 college sports – and, in general, how to be better parents.

But what does it get us besides physical fitness, and life lessons?

For those male and female adults with (figurative!) “hair on their chests,” they want to know (Grrrr!) does all this money for facilities etc. get us state championships?

Yes.

Soccer is a perennial winner, both boys and girls.

Lacrosse has come to dominate state play despite only being seven or eight years old.

Cross country, and track and field can brag about long, rich blood lines here. Guys like Ron Kelly and Steve Ross have coached for about 75 years. That breeds success.

Ice hockey has also become a favorite reading topic in the morning sports pages for alumni. The other kind of hockey – field hockey – has also become a happy note on our sports resume the past few years.

Baseball, football, tennis and volleyball have had their bright and shining moments as well, but are still working for year-after-year consistency.

Why the success?

My answer is – Omaha Beach, D-Day. Think opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan.”

We have a ton of kids involved.

The town of Scarborough now packs about 22,000 people in Zip Code 04074 land. The high school is close to 1,100 in enrollment.

With those numbers, our teams can throw a lot of kids at an opponent. Some sports benefit from depth, numbers. Football is one.

Some sports require a couple studs, then simply a bunch of solid, though not spectacular, performers. Baseball is perhaps such a sport.

Gone are the days when we have baseball players who can’t catch a ball, or basketball players who can’t dribble a ball.

Nowadays, if your kid wants to play a varsity sport, he or she will probably:

– do some offseason conditioning and workouts;

– play in different private leagues throughout the year;

– get private instruction; and

– realize that sports are so competitive at SHS that “Non-carnivores need not apply.”

The level of success will remain.

The state titles will keep filling up the trophy case.

For those sports that are “not quite there yet,” the passage of time will help, and/or the addition of some extraordinary adult intervention in the form of coaches who know you can’t just “sit back, add water, stir and let it happen,” as one coach was described a few years ago.

Money from taxpayers helps. Maybe the other missing ingredients will come for the other teams some day, too.

Dan Warren is a lawyer who lives in Scarborough who can be reached at jonesandwarren@gmail.com.