On the surface the news was devastating. Natchez missed landing a more than $1 billion investment from a Chinese paper manufacturer.

Earlier this week a town in Arkansas was announced as the winner in what had quietly become a two-city competition.

The 250 permanent jobs and the approximately 1,000 indirect jobs — loggers, truckers, etc. — come with the project.

It was a bit like being the guy holding a lottery ticket emblazoned with all the winning numbers, except one.

Despite what inspiring coaches tell their near-champions, being second place doesn’t immediately feel good. It stings.

Natchez and Adams County have had their share of “promised” economic development prospects — remember Rentech and KiOR?

The challenge with both of those developments was that they were built on almost dream-like technology that couldn’t be made viable in the world market.

The Sun Paper development was real. The company was real and a valid, operational business producing the same product elsewhere. It made sense that it could work in Natchez — we have forests of timber resources and good river access.

But we missed that one. Let’s lick our wounds, pull up our britches, as former Gov. Haley Barbour famously said, and get back to work.

The reality is — it’s truly amazing that we were in the running for such a huge development project only a few years after our economic development entity fell apart and had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

At time of the demise a statewide economic development expert gave us a distasteful dose of medicine by suggesting, “You’re not in the game right now.”

He was correct.

But clearly that’s no longer the case. We’re definitely in the game again. We swung and missed that pitch, but more are undoubtedly coming in the years ahead. Eventually, we’ll connect if we keep working hard and keep our collective eye on the ball.