Rivalries are what sports are built on — Red Sox vs. Yankees, Duke vs. North Carolina, Lakers vs. Celtics.

So what would happen if the Big 10 Conference came out and said the annual Michigan-Ohio State football game wasn’t going to happen next fall? There would be nationwide pandemonium.

That’s basically what has happened within the Federal Way School District the last couple of years. Realignment within the South Puget Sound League has left the four Federal Way high schools in separate divisions and negated longtime rivalries.

But Federal Way High School is hoping to change that. Last week, the school was forced to appeal a vote by the league’s principals association that would force either Federal Way or Thomas Jefferson to move from the SPSL North Division into the league’s South Division.

“The goal is not to have this be a prolonged thing,” said Federal Way High School athletic director Miguel Perez. “We want to move this along as quickly as possible. We want what’s best for the league.”

What’s best for the league would be moving Auburn and Auburn Riverside high schools into the SPSL South and bringing Beamer into the North Division. Sounds like a pretty simple and logical choice, doesn’t it?

That would keep all the athletic programs from multi-school districts (Federal Way, Kent, Auburn, Puyallup, Bethel and Spanaway) in the same divisions of the SPSL.

But simple and logical aren’t the way some of the principals and athletic directors around the SPSL are making the realignment, which will take effect before next school year.

The need for realignment comes after the league admitted Des Moines’ Mount Rainier High School and reclassified Decatur as a 3A school. The Gators’ departure from the South left an open spot in the division.

The vote by the principals chose the “Federal Way-Jefferson moving South” option over two others, including sending Auburn and Auburn Riverside to the SPSL South and moving Beamer to the North. The other option would have placed Mount Rainier in the South.

“When you look at it, obviously multi-high school districts would want to all be together,” Perez said. “It seems like it’s going in another direction for us.”

Keeping districts with more than one school in the same division would be a no-brainer. And it seems like it is everywhere around the SPSL, other than Federal Way.

Splitting up the Federal Way schools means the teams don’t get to play one another during the regular season, ending longtime rivalries. It also takes away a lot of money from the schools’ coffers. Schools get to keep money raised from selling tickets.

It’s a travesty that Federal Way and Decatur didn’t get to play twice this season on the basketball court. In the past, those games between two of the better programs in the state were guaranteed to sell out — and school officials usually had to turn away fans at the door.

According to Perez and TJ athletic director Mike Grady, the SPSL set a precedent when Beamer was kept in the SPSL South before the 2008 school year, allowing Auburn and Auburn Riverside into the North after both competed as 3A schools for two years. The SPSL principals cited geography as the reason. Beamer was the southernmost school not in the SPSL South.

“This doesn’t mesh and isn’t consistent with what they’ve done in the past,” said Federal Way High School athletic director Miguel Perez. “The criteria they used then is not being used now.”

In terms of geography, Auburn and Auburn Riverside are located south of the two Federal Way schools and closer to Highway 167, which is the main freeway leading to a bulk of the SPSL South schools in Graham, Spanaway and Puyallup.

Officials in Auburn and Kent have cited the tradition of the two cities competing against each other as a reason for voting against sending the two Auburn schools south. But tradition went out the window a few years ago when both Auburn and Auburn Riverside left the SPSL North to play as Class 3A schools. That experiment lasted only two years before the Auburn schools returned to the North.

According to Grady, a move by Federal Way or Thomas Jefferson from the North into the SPSL South Division would add $15,000-$18,000 to the school’s athletic transportation budget.

That number is a bigger deal within the Federal Way district. Here, each school’s Associated Student Body (ASB) fund is responsible for its own transportation costs. That is not the case in other school districts, where there is a general pool for transportation costs throughout all schools.

We will see what happens. But it doesn’t look like the simple choice is going to be that simple.