High school basketball tournaments start later this month. Championships will be won and lost. Memories to last a lifetime — good and bad memories — will be made.

This is about a championship lost. And a bad moment for a good kid.

Let’s go back to the 1970s, and Larry Bird and his high school teammate, Beezer Carnes. Beezer’s missed free throws knocked Spring Valley out of the prestigious Indiana high school basketball tournament 42 years ago. In a conversation with Dan Patrick last year, Bird said, “The dream was to be good enough to play against the big schools. Unfortunately, I played with a kid who kept missing free throws and we didn’t get there.’’

When Patrick followed by asking, “You’re not over it, are you?,’’ Bird snapped, “Never. It was a big loss. I was at a party about two years ago and this lady in her 70s looked at my friend and said, ‘What are you doing here? After missing those free throws back in ’74, you shouldn’t even show your face.’ ’’

Which brings us to Steve Hazard, my former Groton High School teammate who made a mistake in a big game 43 years ago and was never the same after it happened.

Haz was a junior on the 1972-73 Groton High basketball team. He was a backup guard for coach John Fahey, who had rebuilt the town’s basketball program when he arrived as a 22-year-old teacher/coach in the fall of 1962.

Fahey’s Crusaders went undefeated and won the Wachusett League championship in 1963-64. We got back to the title game in 1970 and annually contended for the league title after I graduated in ’71.

I knew all the guys on the 1972-73 team. And I forever heard the story of the season’s biggest game when Haz got confused and intentionally fouled a kid from Quabbin Regional with the scored tied and only four seconds to play.

You know how it goes from there. The kid from Quabbin went to the line and made his first free throw to put his team up by a point. He missed his second shot and Groton rebounded, but Bobby Campbell’s halfcourt heave hit the front rim at the buzzer.

Ballgame.

League championship lost.

Local devastation.

It was so bad for Steve Hazard that he didn’t even go out for the team the next year — his senior year, when he surely would have been a starter.

“If not for that one play, I absolutely would have played my senior season,’’ said Hazard, who lives near Syracuse and works as a truck driver after a 28-year career in the computer business. “I felt I had let the team down.

“I totally screwed up losing track of the score. That mistake was pivotal. The lesson is that you have to keep your head in the game.’’

Those of us who grew up in Central Massachusetts in the 1960s and ’70s didn’t have much in the way of entertainment. The Ayer movie house burned down in the mid 1960s. We had apple farms and paper mills. We made our own fun. We were so small, we didn’t even have a football team. A trip into Boston was a once-a-year thing, like flying to Paris.

The high school basketball team was a big deal in town, and for most of the years of my youth, the packed little gym on Main Street was the warmest and most exciting place in Groton on Tuesday and Friday nights from December through February.

Playing high school games and maybe winning championships can be the most important thing in your world when you are 17. The guys who lost to Quabbin 43 years ago are in their early 60s now. But they remember. They remember the way anybody who ever experienced those moments remembers.

“I have a terrible memory for almost everything,’’ said Bob Perreault of Lunenburg, a star guard on the ’73 Groton team. “But I remember everything about that night.

“Cambs [star center Campbell] scored with about 15 seconds left to tie it up. Somebody called time out and Fahey put Haz in the game. They brought the ball down. Their guard had the ball and we had him double-teamed in front of their bench and I was thinking overtime, and Haz just came out of nowhere and grabbed the guy.

“We just looked at him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He thought were down by 1. I even remember the name of the guy who went to the line. Telancy. He hit the front end of the one-and-one, then missed the second one.

“Steve got the rebound and got it to me at the point, and I hit Cambs crossing over the middle, and he hit the front of the rim at the buzzer from halfcourt. That was it.

“I went over to the stands opposite the visitors bench and sat in the front row of the stands. Cambs went out the door. He just went outside. We didn’t even go in the locker room right away. The gym emptied out.

“By the time we got to the locker room . . . nobody ever said a word to Haz, as far as I know. I know I didn’t. And he just disappeared.

“He went into a cocoon. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. He didn’t want to talk about it. I swear I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him since. He just withdrew. I know he was at school, but he was invisible. I felt bad over time about not consoling him. I don’t ever remember approaching him and saying, ‘Forget it.’

“I saw him at his brother’s funeral a few years ago. I went through the line and shook his hand and he looked right by me. Maybe he didn’t know who I was. To this day, he didn’t want to talk about it.’’

Coach Fahey, now 77, retired, and living in New Hampshire, said, “I put Steve in because I knew he was a good defensive player. After the play, all I said to him was, ‘Did you understand the score?’

“I didn’t meet with him after the game. I’ve often thought about it. In retrospect, I was remiss that I didn’t talk to him a lot about coming back to the team for the next year.’’

“We were concerned about Steve and how he was taking it,’’ said Mark Monroe, another teammate from 1973. “There was a little bit of anger and some frustration. It would have been good to win that game, but we were all to blame, not just Steve. I missed three or four shots and any of them could have made a difference.

“It was 40 years ago, but something like that is hard to forget.’’

“We didn’t have counseling back then,’’ said Perreault. “We counseled ourselves.’’

Hazard has three adult children and seven grandchildren. He takes responsibility for his long-ago mistake.

“I always wanted more playing time,’’ he said. “Coach told me that defensively, I was a starter, but offensively, my game needed work.

“I was always looking at it from my standpoint. That’s what you do when you are that age. I really felt like it would be nice to get a little bit of starting time.

“I had a little resentment about it. But when you’re playing the game, you have to keep your head in the game, and my head wasn’t in the game. The whole game I was thinking, ‘You should put me in.’ The attitude took over.

“We all reflect on things. We’re a product of things that happen to us in life. That was one where I felt like I let the team down.

“I came into that game with an attitude. I had a little bit of hard feelings for the coach and my dad had some hard feelings for him. It was an attitude I had the whole season. Maybe I should have just stayed home that night.’’

Last year, more than four decades after the painful, career-ending game, Steve Hazard returned to Groton for his high school reunion and met with his old coach, John Fahey.

“We had a great conversation,’’ said Hazard. “It was the first time I’d seen him in all these years. I hadn’t been back to any reunions. I don’t have any animosity for the coach now. He’s a great coach and it was so good to see him.’’

All the days are not Glory Days. Try to remember Steve Hazard when you watch high school tournaments this year.

Dan Shaughnessy can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Dan_Shaughnessy