While the tentative deal struck between the NBA and the Players Association early Saturday morning concluded a five-month work stoppage period that pushed the league to the brink of catastrophe, the national sports media deprived a country of sports fans from seeing a team return to the hardwood following heart-wrenching devastation and loss.

The Oklahoma State women’s basketball team took the court on Saturday for the first time since head coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were killed in a plane crash on Nov. 17 along with boosters Olin and Paula Branstetter.

The Cowgirls defeated Coppin State 59-35 in the contest, but the result of the scoreboard must have felt like a hollow accomplishment for a young group of athletes going through an unparalleled heartbreak and travesty.

The team’s resiliency to the traumatic week it experienced, featuring several funerals and memorials, wasn’t even a topic of discussion on the late Saturday edition of ESPN’s SportsCenter, which was dominated by sex scandals, college football and the NBA’s lockout.

On ESPN.com, there was only a single story about the game packaged with a brief two-minute video clip.

That simply isn’t enough attention for this story, and it’s a shame on the company’s producers for ignoring a story with such a high level of human interest. In comparison, the website has over 50 different stories on the Penn State sex scandal coupled with more than two dozen video reports.

In the field of journalism, reporters are assigned to cover specific stories and that’s why some topics are written about extensively and others are not. Who is doing the assigning these days? It’s asinine for any editor of any sports section to ignore this particular story, yet it happened.

Is the greed of NBA owners and the incompetence of the Players Association really worth talking about more than a team playing a game nine days after the death of two of its coaches? The answer is a resonant no.

“Today was much deeper than the basketball part of it,” OSU interim coach Jim Littell said after the game. “It’s much, much deeper than a basketball game.”

When the Cowgirls beat Rice 96-60 back on Nov. 13, with Budke and Serna on the sidelines, it marked the last time that their season was truly about basketball. From now on, every game and every moment they experience together will be apart of an extensive recovery process the school’s athletic department must undertake again, coping with the heartbreak of loss for the second time in just more than a decade.

In January 2001, a plane carrying members of the men’s basketball team crashed in a snowstorm following a game in Boulder, killing all 10 on board.

“There’s going to be a wide range of emotions this year,” Littell said. “There’s going to be certain things that trigger all of us. We have to take a step every day and try to get better every day.”

This is a team and a school that needs a national fan base to care and to support them; they need our attention now, not in March when the NCAA women’s basketball tournament begins.

Their story will be told and rehashed, I’m sure; however, it’s too little too late at this point. In the wake of arguably the most devastating sports tragedy of the year, the major sports media companies dropped the ball, shunning a team from the spotlight in favor of stories about assault and ignorance.

It’s times like these that the industry of sports journalism must take a step back and reevaluate itself, and ask what’s important.