The OSAA took a consolation bracket and made it the complication bracket.

Pop quiz: Do you know what “state championship” means?

Oregon’s governing body for high school sports does not.

On Saturday, North Medford and South Medford will face off in the 6A state championship. And that sounds like a humdinger of an occasion, doesn’t it?

Except that’s not the real state championship. Not the one that anyone cares about or that matters.

That was the “open” championship. Played Friday between West Linn and Lake Oswego at Hillsboro Stadium.

“The Open Championship to me is the British Open golf tournament,” South Medford coach Bill Singler said in an email. “I don’t know where they came up with this rebranding.”

He added: “We are not the ‘state championship game’ in my mind. That’s the upper bracket.”

Rather than featuring the top two teams in the state, the 6A state championship will boast the Nos. 13 and 14 seeds.

Could the OSAA have mucked this up any more?

There are two things in play here. One is the insistence on calling the secondary bracket the state championship when it is anything but.

The other is whether it even makes sense for 6A to have a secondary playoff bracket when no such thing exists in any other classification.

Over the last decade, the balance of power in the state’s largest division has shifted dramatically to schools in and around Portland. The early rounds of the 6A playoffs had become more like ritual sacrifices.

Enter the Columbia Cup, which for the last two years crowned a secondary champion in 6A. The top 16 teams played for the state championship while seeds 16 through 32 played for the Columbia Cup.

I never loved the concept, but I can at least appreciate the OSAA making an effort to give more teams and athletes the opportunity to participate in meaningful and competitive postseason games.

But they need to call it what it is: A consolation bracket. Or a postseason exhibition tournament.

A rose by any other name is just as sweet? Well, if Bill Shakespeare were here he’d say that by any other name, this is still a consolation bracket. It’s the NIT of high school football.

This year, with the input of coaches and ADs, the OSAA renamed the top division the “open championship” and axed the Columbia Cup in name, but not in spirit. This fall, seeds 13 through 28 are playing for the state championship.

The upshot is that on Saturday, North Medford’s Black Tornado gets a second crack at its rival after losing 33-30 in the Black and Blue Bowl back on Nov. 1.

That’s fun for those players, their parents and the city of Medford. But calling it the state championship is just … inaccurate.

The winner of the “state championship” gets a trophy and its name in the record books, while the teams that finished between and third and 12th in the state — including Sprague, which beat both Medford schools in the regular season but was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the “open” bracket — receive no special acknowledgement.

Why does this matter?

It devalues the meaning of a championship. It takes the issues I had with the Columbia Cup and magnifies them.

It preserves seasons that were only pretty OK, and puts them on the same level not only as the real 6A championship, but also state titles won in 5A, 4A, 3A, 2A and 1A — both eight-man and six-man.

Being called a state champion means something.

What does the state championship in 6A mean?

It means confusion. And equivocation.

After winning the Columbia Cup last year, Sunset coach Damien Merrick told Scorebook Live that, “It’s not a state championship, I’m not delusional about that.”

With that feedback, the OSAA proceeded to rename it … the state championship.

We can be reasonable about the lack of parity throughout 6A without getting carried away trying to solve it.

If the OSAA really wanted to have a secondary bracket that meant something, it would shrink the secondary field and have schools that advance through that bracket play the teams eliminated from the top bracket for a consolation championship.

And they would call it that.

OSAA executive director Peter Weber said in an email Saturday that his organization would look at the terminology this winter.

“We haven’t gotten much feedback to this point but typically will get more input following the season,” Weber wrote.

I’m not one of those to sit around and bemoan a culture of everyone getting a participation medal. Participation is a core value of high school sports.

But winning a championship, a state championship, is supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be exclusive.

It’s puzzling to me that an organization whose primary duty is to crown those champions doesn’t seem to grasp that.

That doesn’t mean North Medford and South Medford don’t have something on the line on Saturday.

They do.

Somebody has to win the complication bracket.