NAMPA - Oscar Wilde once said, "Anybody can make history, but it takes a great man to write it."

In the state of Idaho, boys high school basketball has a rich history, but not much of a record book to go along with it. At least, that's what we thought.

At Dennis Maier's Nampa home, golden-era collectibles color the walls and shelves - not unexpected for a fellow in his mid-sixties. It's when Maier starts pulling out notebooks containing stats dating back 50 years that you know you're in the presence of someone special.

"I'm a total junky for collectibles," he says. "I love the graphics of old comic books, love the old rock-n-roll records, and I just like doing stats."

Bed-ridden by rheumatic fever when he should have been going to school, Maier cured his boredom with newspapers, and writing down the box scores of games that were reported. He tracked all sports - but high school basketball was his passion, and as it turns out: Idaho's prep hoops was lacking a statistical history.

"Idaho doesn't have a state record book for prep hoops," Maier said. "I thought it was something they should do."

The Idaho High School Activities Association does keep athletic records - but only from State Tournaments. IHSAA director John Billetz told me that's largely because sports like track and field can vary so widely between meets, scorers and weather conditions. IHSAA can control state tournament environments, and that's why it's the only time an official state prep record can be established. Football is the exception, but a record claim must be prooven to be accepted.

"I guess if you're going to do something like [what Maier's done], basketball would be the perfect sport to do it," Billetz said.

What Maier has done over the years, is add to his collection of hand-written statistics until he got every player from every team in Idaho since 1963.

When he needed to fill in the blanks, he'd spend hours in front of micro film machines at libraries across Idaho.

And just how complete are his statistical records?

"The first year or two are anywhere from 70-80 percent, for a long time after that, it's 98-100 percent," he said.

For the last decade, Maier's been transferring the hand-written info into computerized spreadsheets. He's suffered through two computer crashes (and subsequent loss of that data-entry work) but now has over 30 years of his work digitized and printed out into notebooks. He keeps one in his office, and prints another for the IHSAA.

Billetz recalled meeing Maier for the first time.

"About four or five months into this job, this gentleman walks in and I didn't know who he was, and he hands me this notebook about like this, with all this information in it. It was just phenomenal," the director beamed.

Recently, Maier connected with Bill Bogan, webmaster of the local prep hoops site www.idahoops.com, and gave his entire digital library to Bogan for use on the website.

"He's the only person on the planet that has that information," Bogan told KBOI 2 by phone. "I've gotten emails from fathers of current players, now their sons can look up their dads and see how they did in high school, it's pretty cool."

And the most amazing thing? Maier's collection doesn't end with Idaho.

"I do a lot for other states, it's gotten to be an obsession with the internet now," he said. "I do Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado and Utah."

Maier, who is retired, says the obsession is basically a full time job - of which his wife is "very understanding."

As he continues to bring new notebooks of state history to the Idaho High School Activities Association, the question of who continues to add to the history in the distant future is unfortunately a murky one.

"We don't really know what will happen," said director Billetz. "Maybe that would be the responsibility of our office, but we have a hard enough time getting the info from schools we need right now. Iit would take an all-out effort from our schools."

Maier, meanwhile, has a savant-like command of his nearly 50-years of basketball (and many other sports) record-keeping. The only thing slowing him down is a recent knee replacement. That doesn't stop him from wondering about the future, though.

"I hope there's someone who'd like to take it over, someone younger than I am," he quipped.

"I haven't met anyone yet."

Not surprising, because in a mountain of numbers, finding another 'one-in-a-million' is pretty hard.