Sports are about all kinds of things and one of them is winning. Sorry, but if it’s big enough for the newspaper, rare is it about how anybody played the game.

If one or one’s team can win and fulfill a time-honored cliché along the way, it’s a bonus.

But here’s another truth about sports. Winning isn’t really about winning at all. It’s about the expectations.

Coaches don’t get fired for not winning, but for failing to meet expectations. More than finishing first or winning it all, players are celebrated for exceeding expectations.

Without preseason expectations, nobody’d know whom to vote for coach of the year or comeback player of the year.

Without expectations, but for those rare moments we see something we’ve seen before — like the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon final, Tom Watson’s British Open run and any time Usain Bolt really tries — there’d be precious little to go crazy about in a business that thrives on its customers losing their mind every autumn Saturday, the whole month of March and on a couple of diamonds, wherever they might be, in late October.

Expectations are the name of the game, too, on the most local of scales.

Today begins the first game week for Sooner, Tiger and Timberwolf football. The season, once over, for all three will be defined not by wins and losses, but by how those wins and losses stack up to expectations. Even if those expectations, a result of things happening along the way, become an increasingly moving target.

Bob Stoops and his Sooners don’t have to win it all, but Oklahoma must get to a BCS bowl game and, once there, must win.

If the Sooners claim a fourth straight Big 12 championship, terrific. If they run the table and that last game is for a national championship, the good times might roll around here like they haven’t rolled since the first week of 2001, and still the elation might not match the disappointment of losing the same game or any other BCS extravaganza, because sometimes meeting expectations is simply about doing what you haven’t been able to do in a very long time despite repeated opportunity.

Norman High doesn’t even have to reach the playoffs. Should the Tigers play 11 games this season, coach Greg Nation, if not a hero, will at least look like a fine choice of a head coach to succeed Butch Peters. The difficult truth that the allure of the Tiger program was not enough to line up a list of heavyweights vying for the job will be very nearly forgotten.

Not completely, because it shouldn’t be. The original high school in this town should always be choosing among a list of stars. But if Nation guides his team to the playoffs, or even challenges for a spot coming off a two-win season, he will be deemed on the right track. He will have exceeded expectations.

Norman North has it easy when it comes to the expectations game. Because this is the year after they lost everybody, or everybody who everybody figured would have them challenging for a Class 6A state title.

So Lance Manning can hardly go wrong, even if he’s done himself no favors by clearly liking his team in the preseason after his most talented class donned the T-Wolves’ black and green for the last time.

Miss the playoffs and it’s a rebuilding year at North. Make them and the T-Wolves become one of those perennial teams everybody looks out for.