It’s almost an entire season of work hinging on a turn of a card. The HHSAA’s seeding meeting convened at ‘Iolani’s swank new Sullivan Center on Sunday afternoon, pitting wrestlers’ credentials against each other to draw up the perfect bracket. The goal is to protect the top seeds while avoiding early rematches from league championships.

This year, the toughest decision was at the top of the bracket for girls 121, which featured two state champions in Mililani’s Angela Lee and Kamehameha’s Harmony Pacheco.

Usually, when a league is asked to state its case and it opens with the magic words "returning state champ," that is enough. But not here, so HHSAA wrestling coordinator Carl Schroers asked if the wrestlers met head-to-head. They did not, as Pacheco, an All-American, did not enter the Garner Ivey on Maui and Lee missed the Officials tournament. Each side pointed out credentials until it was obvious the sides were not going to give in. That’s when it went to a vote.

The ILH representative from Punahou — one coach from each league represents the entire league — voted for Pacheco. The OIA rep from Campbell voted for Lee. The BIIF and MIL voters abstained; it seemed deadlocked to them. So after all of that work, Schroers pulled out two playing cards, an ace and a deuce, and asked someone to choose one of them for the OIA. A red 2 was chosen, giving Pacheco the honor of going into the tournament as the top seed and leaving Lee on the other side.

The other card draws at the top involved Alex Fautanu of ‘Iolani over Kahuku’s Jocelyn Alo at 175. Courtnie Taua of Baldwin got the third seed at that weight class over Kawena Ruamo‘o-Mendiola on another card draw when the Oahu schools abstained.

The committee went through every wrestler in the field, though never by name.

At meets, all of these same coaches spoke reverently about Mid-Pacific’s Josh Terao, who will be going for his fourth state title. But here he was simply referred to as "I1" for his ILH championship the previous day.

Each bracket discussion opened with Schroers asking the group for nominations for top seed. In Terao’s weight class, the ILH representative — in this case Punahou’s Yoshi Honda — simply responded "ILH." Nobody contested it. Who would dare?

Schroers asked for the second seed and the OIA jumped in with no discussion because of the credentials of Mililani’s Zachary Diamond. This repeated itself until each league champion was seeded, then started again with each league runner-up to complete half the bracket.

Where it got trickiest was finding opponents for those top eight. Everything was contested, down to the seeding of any alternates who made their way into the field. Once the bracket was complete, the committee went through it once more to ensure that it looked good.

It was much like an old-school Rotisserie baseball draft, where some coaches showed up with binders full of notes and others, like Kauai, emailed in their instructions.

It had the same banter between picks, but selections were completely serious. Every single wrestler got their due.

High school coaches assembled their wrestlers on Monday and told them that what happened in the wrestling room matters more than anything that happens in the seeding meeting, that a wrestler can win a state championship from anywhere on the bracket.

That’s true, but the seeding committee was not just taking great pains to draw perfectly perpendicular lines in the sand. Over the past five years, the top seed has won the tournament 75 percent of the time and made the final 93 percent of the time.

But those numbers go out the window beginning Friday, when Waianae’s Dallas Frederick takes the mat against 106-pound top seed Cameron Kato of Punahou and tries to show the people who spent four hours asking "who is the tougher kid," that all of their time was wasted.