Some of life’s great lessons can be learned, not in victory, but in defeat. If someone asks you what is the single most important thing about sports, how would you answer? Hopefully not with the word ‘‘winning.’’ The best answer, from this perspective, is really simple: To try your best. Sometimes in sports, your best isn’t good enough. The opponent is just better than you. And that’s OK. As long as you did everything you could to try to win. This is why my favorite high school football movie is ‘‘Friday Night Lights.’’ It’s based on a true story about a team from Odessa, Texas, that plays in the 1988 state championship game — and loses. It’s not that I wanted the team to lose. Like any good movie, you get to know the characters and hope the best for them, and it certainly would have been a fine film had the team won. It’s so much better, though, because it’s one of the rare sports movies where the team doesn’t find some incredible way to win at the end.