Two games, one Tandy TRS 80 Model 100 ... good luck!

Boy did we all think on the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, 1988 that we were going into a new world of technology. When Steve Sosinski, our managing editor, told the sports department that we were going to go out on assignments with a new "toy" to send back stories, I thought this was heaven.

No more did we have to write our stories out on long-hand on road trips at some restaurant and then call the office collect and have another writer do the dictation over the phone as we read the story. No more racing back to the office after a night event and writing a story as fast as we could before deadline. And no more having our stories mangled by people taking the dictation over the phone, so much so that names were spelled wrong.

No, this was the moment of truth that we were graduating to "big-paper status." The so-called toy (which you see above) was this thing called the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. And let me tell you, it looked easy. That is, it looked easy until you had to read the directions on how to upload a story and send it into our paper's computer system.

Cracking the code to get all the gold at Fort Knox seemed much easier. Inside the soft carrying cover of the machine was a photocopied handwritten piece of paper from the pen of none other than Sam Christopher, the legendeary longtime news writer from Lakewood whose son, Chris, was one of the two fulltime sports writers at the Observer. Now Sam, being the consummate note taker, wrote the directions like he was scribbling down names and places for a story, though I do admit, it was a step above maybe a doctor's handwriting. Translation: They were readable, but it sure took a lot to completely understand what he wrote.

We were winding down the spring high school sports season and still had numerous postseason events on the schedule. In our sports department, the first guinea pig to try the Tandys was our new assistant sports editor, Dave Tippenhauer, who had state track and field to cover that Saturday in South Plainfield. He ran through the tests and obviously got everything to go through.

Well guess who was next to try out the new toy? Yuppers, yours truly.

It was to happen on Tuesday, June 7, 1988 -- or as I sarcastically called it, the day I became a man. But I was about to take my "manhood" to a totally different level unlike Dave. Most everything Dave did was done by the evening the previous Saturday, so he had time to send his agate and story from the track meet. It got through without much trouble, but just in case, he had time to get it all done.

No, I chose the tougher route on this particular Tuesday. It was to be on that day that I would do a "day-night semifinal doubleheader" in the Shore Conference Girls Soccer Tournament at two different fields in two different counties. The first game was a 3:30 p.m. battle between fourth-seeded Toms River North and top-seeded and defending champion Point Pleasant Boro. The second game was a 7 p.m. start at a park field not far from Manalapan High School between third-seeded Jackson Memorial and second-seeded Manalapan.

So you can imagine that after the first soccer match is done at approximately a few minutes after 5, I have to get my interviews done, rush to a place that not only can I eat, but can also type away on the new toy, find the right-fitting phone for the couplers that held the phone to send the story, then make sure the story gets through, jump into a car and travel up Route 35 to the Route 34-35-70 circle, take Route 34 out to Route 33, somehow find my way to Route 9, then to a park that I've never been to in my life, cover that game, get the quotes I need, and then figure out where I could do that story and send it afterward.

Yeah, the only thing easy about this was just how I explained it.

I made sure to do tests the night before. I can still remember it -- I typed in "This is a test" into the machine, called up the number that was attached to our computer system, made sure I heard a fax-like ring, put the phone receiver into the couplers, hit a couple of buttons, watch the machine do its magic by uploading the story and then check the computer to see if it got through.

Miraculously, "This is a test" came up at the end.

This was going to be really easy.

Or so I thought.

Knowing I didn't have to show up at the office that day or night on this gorgeous 7th of June, I headed from my house in a T-shirt and shorts up Hooper Avenue, into Brick, then off onto the Route 70-88 circle (yes, there was still a circle there at the time) and straight onto Route 88 through Brick into Point Pleasant and onto the streets that forced me to park my car on a side road near the football/soccer field. Point Boro has always been one of the most unique schools in terms of location and as I parked my car and walked toward the stadium, I was ready to see North's Mariners, loaded with a lot of underclass talent at 14-3-1, taking on a Point Boro team that was 15-1 and still tremendously good after losing some key seniors to graduation the year before.

This game was a Who's Who of young ladies who would go on to play college soccer one day -- for North, there was Jill D'Alessio (Georgian Court) and the great Linda Kurtyka (North Carolina State), while for Boro, there was Kim Yankowski (North Carolina State), Jennifer Shutt (Virginia) and Karen Anderson (Green Mountain in Vermont). And a number of the young ladies who played for North's soccer team had some part in being on the NJSIAA Group IV championship and unbeaten field hockey team the previous fall like Katie Vignevic, Krista Saponara, Sue Gerbino and Lori Garrabrant.

But the one player that I thought North needed on this particular day was a junior named Dawn Ostrowski, whose college field hockey career was all but set for her after an amazing season as a catalyst on that championship team. She was a pretty darned good soccer player, too, scoring 11 goals and 10 assists for the '88 season. However, it was in the previous game, the quarterfinal-round matchup at home that Saturday against No. 5 seed Howell, that not only did North's fate change, but so did Ostrowski's as well. She ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament going after a loose ball and she was done for the rest of the year. She tried coming back from it in field hockey the next fall, but she had no lateral movement and it was quite obvious she was never going to be the same player she was.

Judging from that, I wasn't sure if the rest of the Mariners were going to carry the load for her. Figured all Point Boro needed to do was a pop a goal in behind freshman goalie Lynn Gesser and that was it.

But that didn't happen. Led by Yankowski, Andrea Mucho, Alaine Kamen, Shutt and freshman backup Wendi Pearce, the Panthers peppered Gesser and the Mariners with plenty of shots. They just couldn't penetrate her.

Then in the second period (back in '88, soccer was played in four 20-minute quarters, now they're played in two 40-minute halves), the Mariners pounced on one of their few opportunities. Kurtyka, North's sensational goalkeeper during the state field hockey championship run, was able to bring the ball into Boro's side of the field and pass off to Gerbino, who was able to find a hole and penetrate through. She lost the ball, but another freshman named Sharon Ruppe was opportunistic. She may have worn No. 13 on her back, but there was no bad luck in this situation. She slipped the ball past Boro goalie Jen MacIver to give the Mariners a 1-0 lead.

And though the Panthers kept the pressure on the Mariners, they never found the back of the net. North had persevered, 1-0. After the game, myself and longtime Asbury Park Press writer Tony Graham talked to North coach Jean Konyhas and Boro coach Bob Kulessa, two of the coaches who started with their programs when the sport became official in 1976. And I interviewed the shy Gesser as well as the very outgoing Saponara, who had to hold it together with her defensive teammates throughout the game.

It was about 5:15 p.m. and I didn't know many places that I could go to send a story. So I made it across the canal into Point Pleasant Beach and stopped for a sub at Jersey Mike's ... the original Jersey Mike's on Trenton Avenue near Arnold, looooooooong before the place became a national entity. And that's where I sat down to do the story. The hard part about writing the story was that if you see the machine above, it only allowed you to look at the story eight lines at a time. And if you needed to insert something into the story above, you'd have to put your finger down on the "up" arrow and wait until you got to the point you had to place your insertion. Talk about time-consuming.

The turkey sub was awesome as always. And by about 6 p.m. I had finished up my awesome story. Now I needed somewhere to send it. I couldn't get the people of the shop to let me use their phone to send it so I made the most of what I had to do. I jumped into my car and found Route 35. I headed north out of Point Pleasant Beach toward the 35-34-70 circle. Right at that intersection was an Exxon station.

Now it's close to 6:30 p.m. and I figured once I got to send the story through a regular phone, there'd be no problem.

The workers at the Exxon station were nice enough to allow me to use their phones. But there were problems. I swear to you I followed directions with the couplers correctly. But each time I tried to send the story ... nothing. Zippo! The handy-dandy Tandy was anything but handy-dandy, which wasn't making feel so randy at the time.

So I called the office from the regular phone they allowed me to use for a few moments or so. I got Chris.

"I'm having problems with the machine. It's not taking the story through. The story is done, just tell the boss that I'm going to have to send the story later. How much later, I don't know? I'll figure it out. I normally do."

Chris was understanding of the situation. I'm not so sure I was.

It's almost 6:45 p.m. and I still had a good half hour to go before getting into Manalapan. Thankfully, the directions the cops gave me the night before to this field were perfect. Getting there seemed to take forever and by the time I showed up in the parking lot to go to the only lit field in the complex, the first quarter was practically over and the second quarter had arrived.

I get behind the young man who was keeping the scorebook for Jackson and scribble down the names of the team on his side. I didn't even bother with getting Manalapan's. I figured, "What the heck. I'm already behind. The next story isn't going to exactly be a novella."

As I start walking away, I can hear the heart-warming and sarcastic voice of Jackson's longtime soccer coach, Mike Costa.

"Did you just get back from the beach?" he said, spotting me in the same T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops that I wore to the game.

"Yeah. Sorry you missed it, it was a beautiful day," I answered back smiling. That's the kind of relationship I had with that man for the 11 years I covered girls soccer with him as Jackson's coach. He was abrasive, but you had to get him and never be offended by whatever this good guy said. We worked together quite well.

Nine minutes into the second quarter, Samara Lenga took a pass and beat standout Jackson goalie Jeannette Nash to make it 1-0. And Manalapan's defense was such that it wasn't going to give away any freebies. It was 1-0 at halftime and already Jackson looked like it was in trouble. Jackson, though, had its opportunities, putting 15 shots on net. but the Jaguars never could get anything against Manalapan's defense. And when Doreen Gilbride scored with 4:16 left in the game to make it 2-0, the door was practically closed.

I interviewed Costa afterward in which he asked me, "Did North really beat Boro?" to which I replied, "Yes. They were outshot and yet they held it together." "Wowwwwwww," he said back. "I didn't see that coming. Good for Jean and North."

Then I interviewed Manalapan coach Bill Ciullo, a very affable guy and one of my favorite out-of-area coaches I've talked to in my career. I was going to see him again in the final against North. One thing about Bill Ciullo -- when he had a very good team, man was he a confident guy. He felt like he could beat North, even with the final on North's field that year. And his Braves did, but not without a fight, winning the title game, 2-1, two days later.

But that was two days later.

I still had to deal with the present.

It was just about 9:15 p.m. I had a second story to type into a machine that had yet to work for me. Some example I was setting on this day. Well, nonetheless, I called the one person at nearby Manalapan Diner who I thought could get me out of this quandary at this hour with a couple of hours left before trouble lurked.

"Hello?" "Hi grandma! How are you?" "Hiiiiiii Mark. I'm fine. And how are yooou?" "I'm just fine thanks. Listen I need a favor." "What's the matter?" "Can I come over to your place to write a story? I'm in Manalapan, it won't take long and it's sorta complicated because I'm working with a computer that I'm using for the first time."

I can almost hear the reluctance of my grandmother saying, "Come on over." But hey, I was blood, and she'd help me out in a time of need.

So it took about 25 minutes to get to where she lived on the Howell-Freehold Township border off of Route 9. I could get to her place with a blindfold on. She waited for me at the door. Hugs, kisses ... and, oh, by the way, I need a desk to work at.

Once I showed her the new toy I was playing with, I was able to actually send the story by using the other means to send it -- the wires that went from the machine into my grandmother's phone, which at this point was far easier than the the headache couplers were. Shazaaaam! The Boro-North story that I worked on four hours earlier had gone through at last.

I called up the office to make sure it came through. Got Chris again. He checked the story and then told me I had a message.

"Call Tony Graham. He wants to know who the name of the one girl you and he interviewed after the game was."

"Oh? OK."

Yes, even the great Tony Graham made the simplest of mistakes of not getting the name of the person he was interviewing. After smiling for a second, I called up Tony's extension at the Press. He explained in his rush to get out of Boro and back to the office in Neptune he had not gotten the name of the girl we were talking to and he didn't want to guess.

"That was Krista Saponara. I know her because she was part of that state champion field hockey team in the fall. Really cool girl, too." By the way, 10 years later, I did a feature story on Saponara while I was up in Bristol, Conn., covering the Eastern Regional Little League All-Star Tournament that Toms River East American was playing in. She was a producer working for ESPN at the time and got to meet ESPN football analyst and former Green Bay Packers wide receiver Sterling Sharpe while I was there.

"OK, I thought that was who it was. Thanks a lot for your help."

"No problem Tony. You've helped me before. It's easy to return the favor with you."

And it was. Tony Graham is easily the best sports writer from another competing paper I've ever dealt with in almost 28 years in this business. I just felt bad that I couldn't help him sooner, but remember, it's 1988 -- there was no way to communicate with one another back in the day since there were no cell phones.

Needless to say, I typed in the "easier" Jackson-Manalapan story as well as the agate from the game and sent the story, all within about a half hour.

And by about 10:15 p.m., my day was done. Everything worked out and my grandmother was the star of the night in the end. I stayed at her house until about 11. I knew I was pushing her bedtime, but I always told her that if I had enough time after an event ... or before ... I'd come to visit her. Of course, I never told her that when I came to visit, I'd have work to do, too. But she was always good about it.

By 11:45, I was back home, never once having to see the office and never once having to dictate a single word from a story I did to Chris Christopher or any other writer to take down on computer. The Tandy was a success and these would be the machines I would use for the "far-away" events I covered for the next 11 years while I was at the Observer.

No more dictation!

Before I knew it, June 7 was June 8. And I didn't have to be in the office to finish out the paper at deadline. I could come to the office right after the much-anticipated Ocean County Softball Tournament final between South Jersey sectional champions Central Regional and Monsignor Donovan at Toms river South.

Overall, it was a very good day. And night. And a successful day and night, too.

And I became a man that day.

 

Somewhere above, I know Amo has my back

It's been 28 years since Regina Ammerata, our class advisor and my junior year Algebra I teacher, handed me my diploma to confirm I was officially a high school graduate. OK, she really didn't give me my diploma. That was handed to me up in the cafetorium once I turned back in my cap and gown.

Still, it was a momentous occasion to say the least. But I can admit something today that I couldn't do 28 years ago. By the time I got to my junior year, I actually liked school. The first two years -- which I'm told are usually the two hardest years of high school -- were as painful as a trip to the dentist office for a routine root canal. Being picked on as a freshman by loser sophomore burnouts who don't really have much to offer in life and probably won't when time will tell unless they figure that being a bully isn't the way to go was not the bestest of times for me. I hated school.

But what got me through those first two years of high school were three friends that I will forever be grateful to have -- even if sadly one of them is no longer among us and hasn't been for nearly 20 years.

When I was a freshman, it was hit or miss as to who you were going to have around you at lunchtime, simply because you had no clue. It wasn't as if I had anyone freely to pass along the information to. I kept to myself for the most part. Unless it was people from the neighborhood I grew up in, I had no idea who some of these people were.

However, there was one person that I knew because he was in my eighth-grade class at Toms River Intermediate School East. His name was Chris Amoruso. Amo, as I called him, was friendly enough to feel safe around and outlandishly wild enough to squirm around, too. God knows what he might say or do to cause some kind of embarassment at any time or any place. That was Amo, and I accepted him for who he was. I always thought he was the second coming of John Belushi with the things he said and his actions. If our high school class had a superlative category of "Most Likely to Turn Out Like Senator John Blutarsky," it'd have been Amo.

Amo, to me, was the friendly face in a sea of faces that I had no familiarity with in seventh-period lunch.

Yet, there he was along with a friend he grew up on the island with across the Barnegat Bay. His name was Scott Abbott. Scott was one of the smartest people around. And it was amazing how the three of us hit it off as if we were all from the same neighborhood. I still remember a cold February 1981 day in which Amo invited me to come to Scott's place to play cards. We spent the whole afternoon just doing so, my mom dropping me off in the morning on a day off from school and her picking me up late in the afternoon. I felt safe among the two of them, but so isolated since they were on that side of the bay and I was on the other side of the Mathis-Tunney Bridge.

By luck come sophomore year, the three of us were put together again in the same lunch period. Someone must have been watching. But early in that sophomore year, Chris had brought a friend along who was shy and well, I wasn't sure if he was going to break up what Chris, Scott and I had as friends. He was pretty conservative, but Amo introduced us to the new guy. His name was Tom.

Tom seemed kinda shy at first, probably the feeling-out part considering he knew Chris and I think he kind of sorta knew Scott. He didn't know me. I was that guy that Chris could make fun of and knew I was not threatening in any way and I came in peace. By the time Tom -- it took me about a month or so to find out his last name was Yanna-something, I couldn't even tell you what I thought it might've been in November 1981 -- got comfortable around the three of us, we all saw a transformation that I didn't quite see coming.

If anyone did, they were just flat-out lying.

Tom, we come to find out, was a big fan of this British music act that I had heard of called Adam & The Ants. I knew "Dog Eat Dog" and "Antmusic" and "Stand And Deliver" when I was a freshman. I went to Listening Booth and Camelot Records in the Ocean County Mall a lot. He was living out being Adam Ant or one of the Ants or some facsimile of them. He got all punked out, which worried me a little. You don't go from conservative looking to a punked-out Adam & The Ants Meets The Clash Meets Madness look that easily.

But that, I still to this day believe, was the power of Chris' aura. It worked well for Tom. It wouldn't have worked well for Scott and it sure as hell wasn't going to look good for meeeeee. That's what Amo's personality was all about. The three of us just stood back and let Tom be this non-threatening individual and we actually enjoyed it.

I also had Chris in Rick Dispoto's geometry class that sophomore year. And the year before that, I had him in Warren Reid's physical education class. And in the latter class, there were three burnouts, two who were in that class taking it again. And one was a neighborhood kid who acted as if he was the bully of it. His role was to agitate me. It was easy considering his two burnout-bully friends were sitting around both Amo and I. Even though my name comes after Amo's in alphabetical order, I always got to sit in front of him in those two classes. One time, the said "bully" came in and whipped his burnout jacket right into my chest. I stopped for the moment as I looked at Chris and he looked back as in to say, "What the f**k, man?!"

But the looks we gave to one another were code ... as in "I got your back" and "Yeah, I know. Thanks." Chris had a way to pick his moments and nail the "bad guys" when they least expected it. He didn't nail the main agitator, but during a wrestling drill in Mr. Reid's class (Mr. Reid was the wrestling coach), we had one of those quick drills where you were matched up against someone who was opposite you on the wrestling mat. When Chris came out to the mat, one of the burnouts was his opponent.

No chance for the poor guy -- Amo took him down and wrapped him up like a pretzel. And when the other burnout conspirator/co-hort was in Amo's way the second time around doing those quick wrestling drills, he had him down quickly and wrapped up like a pretzel, too.

Needless to say within time, none of those guys were bothering me anymore.

That was Amo.

Amo and I had a blast in geometry ... not really by learning anything, but by watching Dispoto flirt with two of the girls in the class, so much so that he put their desks up practically near his desk, one of those girls being my neighbor. That was always worth talking about at lunch. Being a partial southpaw, I told Amo I heard a statistic once that left-handed people have an 80 percent chance of being less sick than right-handed people, in which Amo responded in the only way he could respond -- he breathed on me and coughed afterward.

Yeah, that was Amo.

Amazingly again in our junior years, the four of us were put together in the same lunch period. Of course, I always worried at the start of each of those years that if I saw one of those guys, they'd be sick and tired of seeing me. But that wasn't the case.

By junior year, Scott was still Scott -- witty, sarcastic and finding the right things to say at the right moment. Amo was still Amo ... and heck, I didn't ever want him to change. And Tom was becoming the individualist that most people may have bristled at. But he had the three of us -- and we were pretty darned acceptable to anything Tom wore to school, from the thin punked-out jackets to the red Converses on his feet. If Tom wanted to come to school dressed in a gorilla suit, we would've had a great laugh about it and still carried on the same conversation, though I will admit it might have been hard to hear him through the suit.

Unfortunately, by senior year, we were broken up as a quartet and put in different lunch periods. And it was hard for me to find someone who could fill in those six shoes. Admittedly, I struggled my senior year with lunch, mostly because anyone I knew who was a fellow senior was blowing the popsicle joint known as our cafetorium and going to Driftwood Deli for lunch. No one was asking me if I was interested in joining along and it bothered me a little.

After all this time, I still felt like an outsider ... except to the other three guys who got broken up away from me those last nine months of my high school life. I ate a lot of lunches alone and in silence my senior year among underclassmen that I barely knew. If not for John Morgan, a junior who was playing music at lunchtime upstairs, senior year lunch just may have been the crappiest time of my life. Good thing we both had a love for music, though I still believe to this day I must have been agitating the hell out of him.

Still, school was a lot better place to be my last two years. I missed only one day of school my junior year and four total my senior year. Junior year was the best year -- because of my three amigos who allowed someone who wasn't from across the bay to be part of their group.

On Sunday, January 22, 1984, I came to find out that the night before, Chris had gone to a school dance and was seriously injured in a car accident. I went to see him a couple of days later on a miserably rainy and cold January 24 at Community Memorial Hospital, and he looked the role of someone who was hit in an automobile accident on Fischer Boulevard. He was hurting, but he was in good spirits. He was able to joke about things during my 90-minute visit with him. Other than the aches he was suffering and the scratches on his face that made him look like a road map, he was fine. And I felt better for visiting him. He was soon out of the hospital and back at school the next week.

And so it was that Friday, June 15, 1984, I said goodbye to my three friends as I got my diploma and moved on to my next life. Tom moved on to go to the Army and I didn't see him again. Scott moved on to college and I never saw him again.

A year later in the summer of 1985, I'm at the Seaside Heights boardwalk with my friend Joe and we both see Amo. He was working at one of the game stands that summer, maybe moving around to different ones. I never really knew, though. He happened to have the "frog game" this particular night where you take the rubber mallet that is given to you and hit a metal pad and if the frog lands on another pad, you get a prize. My uncoordinated buddy decided to try it and wouldn't you know it -- he got the darned frog on the pad!! Since Amo knew Joe as well as he knew me, he announced, "This lucky bastard just won a prize," and handed him some stuffed animal.

Joe and I left Amo that night figuring we'd see him again sometime that summer. However, we never got back there and all of us had gone about our lives in different directions.

It's Wednesday, March 24, 1993. I was coming back from a high school boys and girls All-Star basketball doubleheader at Ocean Township High School that night. I turned on WOBM-FM to find out what's going on in the news world. The lead story was of a robbery and shooting the evening before at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Lakewood. Well, robberies and shootings are going to get my attention immediately.

But then they named the manager of the store who died at the scene when after opening up the safe for the robber was shot in the back of the head -- it was Christopher Amoruso, 26. The age gave it away, especially knowing his birthday was July 14.

It was as if my world had just come to a skidding halt. By the time I reached the office, I couldn't go in immediately. For the next 10 minutes, I sat in my car and balled my eyes out. You reach as far as you can, wondering "Why? Why did this happen and happen to him?" The murder, come to find out, was an inside job since it came from someone who worked at that KFC and knew the store's makeup. And the murderer was not only found guilty in his trial, but sentenced to life in prison for his cold-blooded act of cowardly disgrace, especially against someone who detested violence so much.

It still, though, wasn't going to bring Amo back. I came to find out from the story in the Observer the next day after the murder that Chris was engaged to be married and he was working his way up through culinary school. His whole future was pretty much laid out in front of him. And one senseless act of violence ended that.

The viewing and funeral was four days later on that Sunday at the funeral home on the Manchester-Toms River border. Another grey, cloudy, yucky, awful day, just like the one that January Tuesday nine years earlier when my friend George and I went to Community to visit Amo. I'd been to services before for my grandfather and my friend Ted's father. That was two funerals in 12 days. They were pretty bad.

But they were older. They weren't a peer of mine. This was someone you joked with for four or five years of your life. This was someone who had your back when you didn't want to fight because you didn't want to. My mom went with me to the funeral home. I saw Chris' mom and his brother, Louie, a state trooper who had the unenviable task of carrying the casket along with other co-worker and friends, including a policeman named John Vierbuchen, who Amo and I graduated with at East. This wasn't where I wanted to see John again after about six or seven years.

And with the open casket, it just hit me. It took me a long time to move away from his casket as I looked down on it. I started thinking about the good times in eighth grade and again in high school. Then I started feeling horrible that I could not keep up with Chris for the next seven and a half years after I saw him last.

The things we always want to say to the people we care about -- the people we love -- we never truly get to say. It took me every ounce of my soul to keep from breaking down right there. I told him I loved him and finally was able to walk away.

The service was hard. I think it took me a few days to get beyond it. Then again, you never truly get beyond a service for a friend.

There are days I think about Amo. Three in particular -- our 10th reunion in 1994, our 20th reunion in 2004 and most recently, our 25th reunion on Friday, August 21, 2009. There is no doubt in my mind that Amo would have stolen the show at each of those reunions one way or another.

I am glad to have Tom Yannacone -- yeah, that Yanna-something individualistic guy I really didn't know his last name when I first met him -- in my life again as a friend that I enjoy talking with from time to time. Voted by his peers as top male individualist of our class (Scott, Amo and I would like to think we had something to do with just letting Tom be himself), Tom's got three kids of his own now, one heading off to military duty shortly just like he did, and is a Seaside Heights cop nearing the end of a long career there. Heck, he even gets to protect the "Jersey Shore" cast and once in a while gets to be in pictures as an escorting cop to one of the cast member's court appearances. That lucky bastard!

As for Scott, I never saw him again, but I am sure that he is doing quite well with whatever it is he is doing. Tom, from time to time, tells me where Scott is, but I always manage to forget after he tells me! I'm sorry for being a bad friend, Scott.

And when I get into Toms River, it's my friends and fellow TRHSE '84 classmates Bobby G. and Double-V that take the place of Amo and Scott when we hang out at some restaurant with Tom and myself.

I wish Amo were still here among us. I won't lie. The pictures I see of him and Tom together dressed up as the Blues Brothers or at graduation are still painful. But to me, lunches or dinners with Bob, Vinny and Tom are therapeutic. I know Tom is there and in some ways, it's still some of the same conversations, just nearly 30 years later ... I can still get him going with some Adam & The Ants' song.

I know Amo is there in spirit when the four of us start BS'ing about anything and everything. I'm pretty sure he'd be happy for how Tom and I turned out, as well as Scott. Same for Bobby G. and Double-V.

Somewhere up above, Amo is smiling.

And I'm pretty sure he's still watching my back, too.

Running a tournament for the first time

I look at what has turned into a soup sandwich with the mishandling of the 32nd annual Ocean County Softball Tournament up here at the Jersey Shore and think back to when I first helped run the tournament.

Yes, a schlubby writer ran this same tournament with the help of coaches. Did it for eight years, eight proud years as well.

Let me start by telling you about how I was able to gain control of the OCT. It started with the championship game of the 1991 final between Toms River North and Brick High -- easily the worst championship game in history with 22 errors made between the two teams in a 9-2 Brick triumph. It was somewhere around errors No. 13 and 14 that Dave McKelvey called me from where he was standing below me at Wilbur Thompson Park. My spot as the official scorekeeper and public address announcer was on what was a large makeshift dumpster that Dave turned into a storage room for his Lakewood High team and for fixing the field.

"This is it," he told me. "I'm done running this tournament. I just wanted to let you know that."

The mark of a class individual who to this day I have the utmost respect for. He could have told me this bit of information during the summer or I may have found out like a week before the 1992 softball season started. I made sure to ask him if he was sure this was it and he nodded his head. Said he was tired of it. At first, I thought he was just sick of watching this awful championship.

All through the summer of '91 and at various times that fall and winter, I was in close contact with various coaches over the OCT. At 25 years old, I wanted to take my turn at helping to run it. I couldn't run it fully, though. This is a school operation, an operation that I knew one of my softball coaches would have to be in charge of and I'd be the person putting down the rules and regulations after discussing it with my "partner in crime."

The one person who I really absolutely wanted to run this tournament with was John Natoli, who had turned Point Pleasant Boro's program from a doormat to a Class C championship team in his first year at the helm in 1990. His program won 34 games in his two years at the helm and in 1991, he helped Dave out by hosting the first-round and quarterfinal-round games at Point Boro. However, as the '91 season came to a close, Point Pleasant's Board of Education was getting ready to cut teachers as part of solving a deficit problem. Since John was in his second year with the school, he was on the chopping block. What a travesty this was -- his softball players arrived at the Board of Education meeting to defend their coach, asking to keep him, but those pleas fell on deaf ears. Natoli's final game was in the OCT semifinal, losing to North, 8-3, in a game that felt like a funeral for the man with players walking off that Lakewood High field in tears.

So no John Natoli to help me. The next step was asking his assistant coach, Ric Malta, who was to take over the program in 1992. He had an idea of how John had done things with the field in 1991 and he was ready to roll with the '92 tournament, hosting it.

When we met to set up how we wanted to do this event, the one thing he told me was that he could not host every game in the tournament. OK, so that was out. What we did was have the first-round games played on the higher-seeded team's field. And the winners -- along with the teams that got byes in the first round -- would come to Point Pleasant Boro's High School/Middle School field to play what we dubbed "Quarterfinal Saturday." We set the times up for the games to start at 11 a.m., then go to 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Memorial Day Saturday, May 23, and the 8 p.m. game would feature the tournament's No. 1 seed against the winner of the No. 8-9 matchup. We did it for three reasons -- one, the tournament top seed was our feature team and we wanted to put them under the lights in prime time on a Saturday. Two, it gave either the No. 8 or 9 seeded team a chance to enjoy a prime-time game and get some kind of a crowd. And three, I knew it might be the quickest game of the night if the No. 1 seed was on its game and had its way. In other words, there was the possibility of a 10-run, mercy-rule inning in 4 1/2 innings.

We set up all the ground rules, got confirmation from Dave, who was still willing to helping us by supplying the old white balls his slow-pitch softball league used for the tournament, and the entry fee -- which was fairly cheap at $65 per team for the tournament.

The next step was to put together all the OCT rules, which I typewrote (yes, I used a regular, old typewriter!!) on 8.5 x 11 paper into folders and hand-deliver these folders to all 15 high school athletic directors or softball coaches, usually the athletic director. Some athletic directors were somewhat excited to see me in their pleasant way. Then there were others who were colder than wet fish, some putting their hands on the folders I gave them like it would self-destruct in five seconds. It would be years later before I figured out the reason why some of these unhappy athletic directors didn't want anything to do with my work was because they didn't want to do any more work. But we had done the work for them.

To show you how thorough we were back in the day, one of my responsibilities for putting together this package was to make calls to all 15 high schools (at the time, there were 15) and ask someone there who had knowledge of the dates of important events when the junior and senior proms were being held. So come the night of the seeding meeting, which was at Toms River High School East, they had a full package of rules, and yes, prom dates. All I asked of the coaches was to show up for the meeting with a copy of their regular-season schedule. If they forgot, I made sure I had a copy of each schedule for the meeting.

The meeting was held on my day off from work, Friday, May 1, 1992, at East. I had made sure to secure East for the seeding meeting and, for the exception of 1994 when we had the meeting at the Best Western Hotel in Lakewood, the seeding meetings were always held at East.

As I was outside the meeting room watching the coaches come in -- and I had brought three pizzas from one of the fine establishments on Fischer Boulevard for the event -- I saw Central coaches Norm Selby and Gloria Garibaldi come in and Norm, the head coach, pulls me over to the side. Now I always listened to Norm, who told it straightforward and didn't mince words.

"Have you seen that Boro field?" he asked. I told him I had not covered a game at Boro's field all season.

"It's in terrible shape. I think you're putting people in danger by playing on that field, especially all the rocks out there," he continued. Now Norm had played on Boro's field just recently, so he knew how rough it was. I couldn't move anything off that field and he knew it, but I told him that I'd make an effort to ask Ric to see what he can do about getting the rocks off that field that might cause danger, as well as watering it. At least there I wouldn't have a problem. The field was rougher than it had been in years and I still guess that Point Boro's budget was such that they eliminated any overtime hours for groundskeepers. It's why when it came to night games, Ric himself had to do all the work.

As for the actual seeding meeting, all the teams involved were there except for Pinelands Regional, whose coach, Pam Boyd, told me she wasn't entering her team that year. I pushed her to try, but I couldn't twist her arm. It was always a rule in my time with the tournament -- we'd love to have all teams in there, but on the other hand, I understand why some teams couldn't go in. So they didn't.

We seeded the 14-team tournament and it was up to the coaches to make their cases for their teams and then after the coaches had their says, they were asked to seed the meeting on paper, No. 1 through 14. Once every coach had given me their sheets, it was my job as the math genius of the bunch to add all the numbers via the seeds. My main rule, and this was mostly to avoid the jockeying for positions by some coaches who threw radical numbers out there, was to cancel out the lowest and highest seeds for the event. That process took about 10 to 15 minutes once I got everyone's sheet. But once everything was confirmed, I was back in the meeting room to announce the seeds.

And I made one cardinal rule error that I never made again by doing this: "The No. 1 seed of the 1992 Ocean County Tournament is Central Regional High School. The Golden Eagles have earned a bye to the quarterfinal round, where they will take on the lucky winner of the game between No. 8 seed Brick Memorial and No. 9 seed Brick."

There was this look of wince from some of the coaches in the room and I can hear Norm saying, "Great, fella. Thanks!" I don't remember if I apologized to Brick Memorial coach Judy DeFrancisci and Brick coach Al Grove, but I do know I should not have gone there. They knew whoever won that game was already going to have this tough task at hand without it being mentioned.

No. 2 seed Toms River East also earned a bye and the Raiders would play the winner of the game between No. 7 Toms River North and No. 10 Toms River South. No. 3 Jackson Memorial hosted No. 14 seed Point Pleasant Beach, No. 4 Southern Regional had No. 13 Lakewood, No. 5 Lacey took on No. 12 Manchester and No. 6 Point Pleasant Boro hosted No. 11 Monsignor Donovan.

After the meeting, I had the coaches who had to play against one another team up to at least look at each other's schedules and prom dates to see what day they could work out to play their first-round games in the tournament. In 1992, this was more a coaches' event. That's why it was more fun to run this tournament in the 1990s than it would have been had I run it today if I were still involved in that capacity. Once the coaches came up with dates they felt were right, they put them past me to put down as tentative dates and then starting Monday, they would confirm having those dates with their ADs.

The coaches' and athletic directors' mission back in the day -- to play one single game in less than three weeks. Honestly, how difficult a task was that?

Starting with the May 7 first-round game between Manchester and Lacey, won by Lacey, 7-4, all six first-round games got done between then and May 20. We were set for our first Quarterfinal Saturday on May 23. My next objective was to put a program together that was representative of the tournament and the eight teams remaining. Never putting one of these together, it was very taxing. And one thing I wanted to do was write a feature story on what was the greatest final in OCT history up to that point, the 1988 finale between Donovan and Central that I covered. Got that done, but getting pictures was a task. Yes, I had collected pictures that our Ocean County Observer photographers had taken throughout the sports season to use for the program. And I managed to find file photos of others. One mug shot I did not have for the program was of Southern coach Dick Manzo. I asked my favorite AD, Kim DeGraw-Cole, if she could have one ready.

"Do you want one of him with a mustache or without? she asked. I told her without since he had shaved that thing off his face in 1989. I drove down to Manahawkin to Southern to pick up the picture in an envelope. I spent the better part of two days putting this together in between my regular work hours. It was not a lot of fun. I can still remember nearing the end of this thing at 6 a.m. Saturday when I did not have Donovan coach Tom Westen's college of graduation. I knew he had the first game of the day against Jackson Memorial, so I figured at 6:30 a.m., it was a perfect time to call him. I got him and he was wide awake. Once he gave me the last bit of information, I now had to go upstairs to the fourth floor and work on making copies of the program. I wasn't going to Staples to spend money on this project and heck, I could get them done on our copiers.

The problem was knowing how to do multiple copies. To me, it was like brain surgery for the first time. It was so bad and I was falling behind and I called my mother to come down to the Observer to help me with making photocopies. Not only did we have to get the photocopies finished, but we also had to staple the programs. And back in 1992, I was naive about this. I printed up 75 copies. For this 2012 tournament, which will now be sold on the Internet since the tournament final took place after I left to show you how poorly run it was this particular year, I only made 32 copies. Then again, it was just a final unlike the eight teams that were showing up 20 years ago.

It was almost 8:30 when my mom got to the building and it was 10 a.m. when I made the decision to get out of the office and head to Point Boro for the first game on the docket. What we did was she took the copies and, probably with my sister, put the programs together and stapled them all at my house, while I got to Boro at about 10:45 a.m. and rushed getting my personal public address system together for this game. Somehow, we made it work and the Donovan-Jackson Memorial game was off and running.

By almost 12:45 p.m., the programs finally were finished as my mother got to Point Boro and dropped them off with me to be sold. Ultimately, I got a copy of the program to Tom Westen, whose team was eliminated. We sold those programs for $1.50 back in the day and not only did the program feature the profile pages of all eight teams and the recap of the first-round games, but we also had that 1988 championship feature story along with all the tournaments from 1981-91 including the lines of all the finals. Trust me, it was well worth the $1.50 we sold it for ... maybe more.

It was a very warm afternoon for the first two games, the second being Toms River East's 10-run rule victory over Toms River North, 13-3. The beating sun was finally going down by the time we got to the two games in the other bracket. Southern knocked off Lacey and in the "prime-time" game under the lights, Central Regional had little trouble with 10-run ruling Brick Memorial.

And the day/night adventure was over. And I finally got sleep. A lot of sleep. And everyone could enjoy the rest of their Memorial Day off. The best part of all that -- no one complained.

Now we didn't have the semifinals set until Monday, June 1 at Point Boro. So we were doing just fine. And back at Boro I went for the first semifinal, slated for 5 p.m. between Southern and Central. Southern took an early lead, but by the third inning, I could see the storm clouds come in. The heavens opened up and let loose with a pounding rainstorm that not only didn't stop, but practically flooded the infield at Boro. Kiddingly, it probably was the softest the infield was all year.

It was decided that the game was cancelled and started over again the next day. I was a soaked rat because I had no umbrella. If not for the fantastic father of former Brick High standout center fielder Nicki Schley handing me an umbrella he had handy, it could have been worse. Needless to say, the field was in terrible condition to even get ready for a second game. Both East and Jackson Memorial had gotten to the field and immediately, Ric and I had to tell both coaches Debbie Schwartz and Al Aires, respectively, that they had to turn around and go home. The next step was having to tell the umpires for the second game they had to go home, too, after arriving.

The worst part, though, was that out of the money for the tournament, which, if you remember, was $875 for 14 teams at $65 a pop, Ric had to pay the two umpires for starting the first game, then pay the two umpires who arrived at Point Boro for the game that never started between Jackson and East as well. That was $192 of inactivity gone away.

So another $192 was invested to get the umpires back for the makeup, which we had stated on the rules sheets would be played the next night, Tuesday, June 2, an absolutely beautiful evening and night at Boro, almost as if there was never any rain there to begin with. Manzo and Southern assistant coach Bill McLennan left Boro's field upset they had to cancel the first game since their team was leading Central. Starting over again, Central jumped out to an early lead, then held off a Southern rally to win, 10-8, and advance to the final. Then the second game between Jackson Memorial and East, two fierce Class A South rivals, was one for the OCT ages. It was a back-and-forth battle that saw East take a lead into the seventh, but Jackson Memorial tied it in the top of the seventh to send it to extra innings where East won the game, 8-7, in bottom of the seventh when Angela Velardi singled with the bases loaded to bring home Vicki Guarneri.

The night was over and I went over to East's side to congratulate Debbie and assistant coach Dawn Dziedzic. It was almost at that point that I was intercepted by Vito Guarneri, Vicki's father, and actually a friend of my family since my sister and his oldest daughter, Dawn, who I graduated high school with at East, were best friends. He started talking as if I wanted Jackson to win. I thought the guy was going to either punch me or fight me! He started putting his index finger into my chest as if I was the bad guy and he was going to make a big deal about it. I have a little more integrity than that. He finally left me alone. I don't know to this day what got into him, but let's just say he was a passionate sports fan and what he did for his daughter. And other than that, he treated me with kindness and respect. It was just one of those moments.

Ric and I got through the semifinals nonetheless. Two games were still left. It was decided at the seeding meeting there'd be a third-place game along with the final on Thursday, June 4. As I got to Point Pleasant Boro again, I was met over there by Ric, who was doing some raking of the infield getting it ready for the two games at about 3:45 p.m. No more than 15 minutes later, Dave arrived with the trophies he had taken care of. He had the first-place, second-place, third-place and Most Valuable Player trophies with him. He dropped them off along with Most Valuable Pitcher, Top Hitter and Top Fielder trophies that the top kids got as well as smaller trophies the top two teams got for playing in the final. He handed Ric and I the bill.

It was $240. With five umpires to be paid $240 for the two games, we suddenly found ourselves in trouble.

"I got news for you there," Ric started. "We're in the red." He wasn't kidding. Because of the rainouts, we went from being ahead of the game to being very behind it. We started thinking about what the heck to do. Then the idea came to Ric.

"I've still got tickets and for both games, we can run a 50-50." Since I didn't have any brilliant ideas immediately, it was the thing to do. So the third-place game went off at 5 p.m. and Ric went around with the tickets selling 50-50s in the final. Glenda Calabro, Al Aires' able assistant at Jackson, looked at me as I announced the 50-50 tickets were on sale, and said, "You must be making up for lost money." Smart woman who had been around sports a long, long time.

By the end of the night, we were still behind and ultimately, I gave Ric some of my sales money from the programs I sold. It was a hard lesson learned for the tournament and we ultimately got back to even. As for the games, the third-place game ended up going to extra innings where Southern beat Jackson Memorial and took home the third-place trophy, the only one ever handed out in tourney history. In between games, both East and Central warmed up, the lineups were announced, the national anthem was played and the 10 previous tournament Most Valuable Players were honored in the pre-game ceremony with the first tourney MVP of 1982, Toms River South's Lynne Prudhomme, throwing out the first pitch -- a strike that I thought was going to take off Central catcher Amy McGowan's glove off her.

As for the championship, a game won by Central Regional, 5-0, over Toms River East, it was memorable. Central scratched out three runs in the first inning on former Golden Eagles pitcher Erin Tulko with Erika Applegate delivering the two-run single to highlight the inning. The game stayed that way until the sixth when Central scored twice more to put it away.

Tara Menschner, a fellow sophomore like Tulko and Applegate, had thrown the first shutout in OCT finals history. We gave out the second- and first-place trophies and the individual award trophies. And the honor for Most Valuable Player, which I announced, was a surprise. It went to Applegate, Central's third baseman and the first sophomore to win the honor.

And as both teams left, the sigh of relief I breathed might have been heard through all of Point Pleasant. We made it. Other than being in the red, the rest of the tournament was a success. And for that moment, we didn't care that we were in the red -- we had a successful day and night of softball. Everything ultimately got paid for and we had a template to run this tournament for the next couple of years at Point Pleasant Boro, then when Ric bowed out, Debbie Schwartz came in to run the tournament with me for the next four years.

We turned a profit the next seven years. Ultimately, we raised the price of getting into the tournament from $65 to $85 by the final year of my run in 1999 when I co-ran the event with Jim Christiano, the former Toms River South coach who ran it by his lonesome the first six years between 1981-86.

The main thing about this tournament as I always brought up was that this was a tournament involving the coaches -- the coaches had the interactions, they made things happen once we put a schedule in front of them and then everything went in motion. And very little did the athletic directors have a problem.

I leave Ocean County for this year feeling sad that the tournament has been ruined by people who couldn't take the bull by the horn and run it the way it should have been run -- for the integrity of getting it done before the Shore Conference and state tournaments took place.

This tournament has never ever been about ego. It's about letting those young ladies play and be their best. I'm proud of the fact that in my eight years of helping run the tournament, we did just that.

Even if we were unprepared and unaware of what pitfalls may have been ahead of us that first year in 1992.

But what a wonderful learning experience it was.

Playing 'Beat The Clock' on a light-less field

It is Saturday morning, May 12, 2012. A beautiful day at the Jersey Shore.

The Ocean County Softball Tournament continues today with a game at Toms River High School East's complex. East has one of the most unique dimensions for a softball field you will ever see. The team plays down in a little gully while fans can watch from the road above the field or in the stands just below that view. But almost a generation ago, it was a new field that begged to be noticed.

In 1994, East moved its softball field from the drab, bland side of the school to down behind the school in that gully. In 1994, I was a co-director of the county tournament with Point Pleasant Boro High coach Ric Malta. We had held the tournament exclusively at his field the previous two years.

However, Point Boro's field -- for its nice little location -- was pretty darned dangerous. I literally once watched a girl from Monsignor Donovan High tear her leg up and miss part of a season because of a slide into a base. It could be hit or miss whether that field got watered or not. And after hearing random coach after coach say they feared for their kids' lives playing on that field and seeing a final where there were no bleachers for people to watch the game, I knew I needed a change of scenery.

Ric agreed to host the tournament again in 1994, but this would be the last of the four-year run for Boro hosting. Meanwhile, East coach Debbie Schwartz wanted to get her new field some exposure for the tournament. So it was agreed that Boro would still host for the semifinals and championship, but the schools would split the 1994 quarterfinal games. At the seeding meeting, we gave coaches the choice of what field they would like to play on if they won their first-round game.

And somehow, we made it work.

So on Saturday, May 21, 1994, the annual Quarterfinal Saturday -- a day I still consider one of the most exciting days the OCT has ever had and I still wished existed -- had a new twist to it. We started at 10 that morning at Toms River East with East hosting Jackson Memorial, followed by top-seeded Central Regional taking on Pinelands Regional. Once those games were finished with East and Central victories, I gathered all my stuff that I used to run a public address system and headed from East to Point Pleasant Boro for the next two quarterfinals that featured Point Boro against Toms River North (the game that involved an inside-the-park strikeout) and Southern Regional against Lacey.

The day, in my opinion, was a success. And there was a lot of positive feedback from the two games at East. I kept this in mind as 1994 finished and 1995 approached.

By then, Ric had pretty much confirmed he did not want to host any more games at his field. The tournament was now all Debbie's from the quarterfinal round on at Toms River East.

There was one slight problem, though: East, which had been promised lights for the start of the season, still had no lights on it. Once Debbie told me before the '95 tournament that having the lights placed on her field might not take place until the championship -- and to me, that sounded iffy -- we decided to do away with that Quarterfinal Saturday for that year. Holding the tournament earlier than normal (with a May 20 championship) was not making me all that warm and fuzzy, either. I've never been for having the tournament start in late April because most of the better teams don't start getting better until just over one month into the season.

Still, we trudged on. For the quarterfinal round, we'd split the four games into two doubleheaders. We'd play two of the games on East's field on Saturday, May 6 with Toms River North playing Lacey and Manchester taking on surprising Monsignor Donovan with the games starting at noon. They went rather well in spite of Donovan's 26-16 long-winded, three-hour marathon victory over the Hawks.

The tricky part, though, would take place on Tuesday, May 9 when East hosted the other two games. Even in daylight savings time, you only have so much sunlight to play with. And if we started the doubleheader at 3:45 p.m. there was a strong chance that both games would not get in.

To make this work, it took cooperation with the two teams playing the first of those doubleheader games. With the urging I asked of two of the better athletic directors I've ever dealt with in my career -- Southern Regional's Kim DeGraw-Cole and Jackson Memorial's Ralph Carretta -- both teams were able to get out of their schools earlier than normal and make it to East by 2:15 p.m. for a 3 p.m. start. Normally, that starting time is frowned upon during weekdays, but without lights up on the East field, we sort of had an "emergency situation."

Both teams warmed up, the umpires arrived, and the game started at 3 p.m. The plan was to start that game at 3, get it done before 5, then have the East grounds crew work on the field, have Central and East warm up and get off playing at 5:30.

This was literally "Beat The Clock" with Mother Nature. I don't suggest any tournament directors attempt to run a tournament this way, but whatever means you need to get it done, you get it done.

Top-seeded Jackson Memorial and No. 8 seed Southern Regional were fierce Class A South rivals. And neither team was giving in to the other. But the problem was that there'd be sustained and long innings. By about the fifth inning, I started looking at my watch quite a bit more than I should have while doing my normal PA work. Jackson Memorial held on for the 7-6 victory and my watch read 5:10 p.m.

One game down, one to go. But how much daylight were we left with? I watched Central and East warm up and had to answer the question a few people kept hitting me with as daylight faded behind the dark clouds that began forming over the East field -- "What happens if we can't get this game in?" I told people they would finish the game up at another time that week, but honestly, I wasn't sure what was going to happen if Central and East could not get done before the daylight disappeared.

The Central-East matchup -- the two schools' first meeting against one another in the OCT since Central's emotional win over East in the 1992 final -- started at 5:45 p.m. I'll admit at that point it was 50-50 that the game would finish up. But things went quick in the first couple of innings. It was about 6:10 p.m. Someone scratches out a run or two, holds the other team down and we're out of there without incident. But in the third, those plans began to fall apart in a big way. Central scored ... and didn't stop! I sat next to a high school classmate of mine watching this (he was there because he was very good friends with East third baseman Vicki Guarneri from basketball) and I expressed my opinion that I could not believe how quickly this game got out of hand.

Soon, it became 7 p.m. And by the fifth inning, Central was close to winning the game early, via the 10-run mercy rule. When Central scored that last run in the bottom of the fifth (as the host team because it was the higher seed) to finish out an 11-1 victory, my watch read 7:35 p.m. It was not how I wanted to see this game ended, especially some pride as a Toms River East graduate.

Nonetheless, we got both games in before the brightness of the day faded out. Ironically, it was the last time East was mercy-ruled in an OCT game. Yet, we did it -- we doubled-down on these games getting in before the sun went down and won.

On Saturday, May 13, we went back to the noon time start for the two semifinals and Central beat Lacey and Jackson Memorial defeated Donovan to set up the May 20 final at East ... when East finally got lights put up.

I will never forget coming home from seeing my girlfriend at the time in Middletown the night before the final and stopping over at East to see light poles finally holding lights over the field. I remember looking out over the field on that dark night and thinking about how really cool this was going to be -- not just for the next day, but for the future of the East program.

The very next night, the lights went on and the first night game ever held on that field was the OCT final between Jackson Memorial and Central. Jackson, unfortunately, played like a team that never played a night game in its life, committing nine errors as Central cruised to its record sixth OCT title, 11-4.

For the next three years, East hosted the entire tournament from the quarterfinal round on with the lights shining brightly at night. It hosted the greatest OCT final ever when Cheryl Zellman hit the game-winning, inside-the-park home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to give Central its seventh title, 2-1, over Lauren Anderson and Toms River North in 1997. It hosted the greatest OCT game ever a few nights earlier when Central stormed back from a 9-5 deficit in the bottom of the seventh to score five times and win the semifinal game, 10-9, over Jackson Memorial.

And now, East has the premier program in the county. Its complex is a jewel, a sight to be seen. The tournament final is no longer there, but the state tournament finals are on that field, sharing the honor with Toms River North's field.

Things are so much different now compared to 17 years ago when East was getting its field notoriety. It was a good time then to showcase the Raider field.

And for one day, it got very scary. I still can't believe to this day we pulled off two games on that field in one late afternoon.

One save ... one playoff loss

For the longest time, I was starting to think Putnam County simply was not good enough to compete with any other school in any sport when it came time for the state playoffs.

Just didn't see it happening. Three years into the job at the Palatka Daily News and I started to wonder if Jeremy Criscione's dramatic state cross country championship in 2004 or his gold-medal 3,200-meter race in the 2005 track and field state 2A championship and Mickey Gilyard's memorable high jump win over three-sport start Jermaine Taylor at the same 2A meet in Coral Springs was about as good as it was going to get.

As a matter of fact, it had been three years -- three months before I got to the paper -- that Putnam County had won a team-against-team state tournament game or match. In the spring 2003 -- I was still living in New Jersey, wondering what my next job was going to be -- when Katie Brosky pitched Palatka High to a memorable, extra-inning softball victory over New Port Richey Mitchell High School.

I had seen my share of football state tourney losses, basketball state tourney losses, softball state tourney losses, soccer state tourney losses, volleyball state tourney losses. You get the picture.

No matter what the sport, I was leaving the venue having to write a "we fought hard, we just weren't better tonight"-type story by the end of the night.

In 2005, Crescent City Junior-Senior High School's boys soccer team had put together an unbeaten regular season, then went out and won Putnam County's first district championship in soccer, either boys or girls, with a 4-1 triumph at Pierson Taylor High School, a great moment for anyone's journalism career to be able to say they covered.

Well, I wasn't there that night at Taylor High. I was stuck having to lay out the sports section that Friday night as my boss took seriously ill for over a week, so ill as a matter of fact that he wasn't able to cover the Super Bowl in Jacksonville that Sunday night and I had to step in for him.

But he was able to get better for me to make a trip to Crescent City the following week and watch as the Raiders' season came to an end against Trinity Catholic of Ocala, 3-2, in the first round of the state 2A playoffs.

Now it was Thursday, February 2, 2006, a year later. The Raiders were the No. 1 seed in their District 5-3A tournament the week before and, in a three-team district, automatically was going back to the state tournament. But Crescent City lost the district final on its home field to rival Keystone Heights, 1-0. And with an overall record of 4-7-4 -- yes, you read that right, four wins, seven losses and four ties -- I wasn't expecting much from the Raiders in their state tournament opener and rematch with Trinity Catholic, this time the game on Trinity's field in Ocala.

The ride from Palatka to Ocala is just over an hour, depending on traffic, but Trinity Catholic is a tricky school to find because you have to take one of Ocala's diagonal-based roads and if you miss the turn for the field, you're driving around trying to find your way back. Fortunately, I had Mapquested the site for a state tournament game there the week before when I saw the Interlachen High girls soccer team get hammered, 8-0, by Trinity. I had familiarity.

So a quick stop before heading on the diagonal road at a nearby Zaxby's restaurant. Got the chicken strips. Mmmmm good stuff. However, I wasn't too careful of what I was doing in the quasi-dark of my car and found a big ol' barbecue dipping sauce mess on the passenger seat. That stain took a while to clean off, especially when I finally completely spotted the darned thing the next day in broad daylight.

Got to the field with about 10 minutes to spare, wrote down the lineups for both sides and waited as Trinity's public address guy ran through the lineups, played the National Anthem and then had a moment of prayer before the game. I was prepared for this since this was the routine a week before -- in 45-degree weather then as I nearly yelled out, "Goddamnit, get this game started!" All the pomp, prayer and circumstance did was delay the inevitable mercy-rule victory Trinity scored over Interlachen.

This time, though, I wasn't expecting a beatdown. The teams had played during the regular season to a tie. And though Crescent City had a 4-7-4 record, it was a deceiving record since they were playing some of northeast Florida's better programs.

The coach of the Raiders, John Thomas, is as laid back as any coach you are going to meet. His coaching mindset is pretty simple -- winning a game starts with winning in preparation. Though he would raise his voice from time to time, he knew it was up to the players to execute the game plan he and his assistant coaches had put together beforehand.

The normal makeup of Raiders players is of Hispanic or Mexican descent. They love the sport as much as the sky is blue and the day is long. The leaders of this Crescent City team were goalie Arturo Martinez, defender Cesar Hernandez and forwards Ivan Robles and Carlos Villegas, who would be our paper's two-time Player of the Year in the sport, including this particular year.

As Thomas gathered his players together before the start of the match, I can hear him in a subtle, confident tone tell his players to dictate the tempo of the game and take it at Trinity. And so the Raiders hit the field against Trinity's Celtics ready for anything. Unlike the girls game the previous week that I did at Trinity, it was a much more balmy 66 degrees at kickoff, making for a far more comfortable event to be at.

And just like the first regular-season meeting, the game became a midfield battle with neither side's defense giving in to the other. And with the game scoreless at halftime, I wasn't sounding so positive with my boss about this thing being settled in regulation time.

"I might be here awhile," I told him at the first break.

I was right. The second half was almost an uneventful as the first half. Whatever shot either team had on the other, it never threatened to break the scoreless tie. Any dangerous opportunity that opened up Martinez was stepping in the way for Crescent City, as was goalie Aaron Watkins for Trinity on the other side.

Eighty minutes and still no score. Now came the two 10-minute overtime sessions. And it became apparent from the way this was going, both team's defenses were playing for the right to decide it with the dreaded penalty kicks.

So my third update to my boss was to tell him we were going to penalty kicks to decide this one and I'll update him when it's done. The Raiders had done everything they could from the midfield back to the goalie to frustrate the Celtics, who came in with a 13-6-2 record. On paper, this game should have been a mismatch by all rights in favor of Trinity, but they couldn't get anything in on Martinez, who made 12 saves.

Now as the penalty kicks were being set up, I tried to settle in my mind who would be the better goalkeeper, Martinez or Watkins, who had nine saves. In 1988 as a field hockey writer in New Jersey, I figured Toms River North and goalie Linda Kurtyka would have their way in a one-on-one shootout with Shawnee and a backup goalie who came into the game only for the shootout. Wow, was I wrong that day as Shawnee won the shootout and won the South Jersey Group IV title.

That memory stopped me at that moment. Whoever was going to win was going to need a break ... a save perhaps or a well-kicked ball bouncing off a goal post or crossbar or flying over the crossbar.

After Thomas and Trinity Catholic's coach submitted their lineups, the first kicker up was Hernandez. He calmly kicked his shot into the net to make it 1-0. That brought up Cho Hyun-Jick for Trinity. He laced his shot high and out of the reach of Martinez to tie it at 1-1.

Next up for Crescent City was senior midfielder Patrich Buenaventura. I had gotten to know this fine young man when he won a local contest a couple of years earlier after writing an essay about what it was like to be an American and how good he had it in this country. It was a well-written, well-thought essay written by a young man born in the Phillipines -- on the Fourth of July, no less --- and who also spent time in Texas and Canada before settling down with his very wise mother and Crescent City teacher and stepfather in Crescent City.

Buenaventura lined his shot up and looked at where he was going with his kick. He approached the ball and nailed his shot. Watkins, however, guessed right on where Buenaventura was going as he dove low and to his right, the sound of his hand hitting the soccer ball and deflecting it away still resonnating in my mind even today.

Buenaventura, a diminuitive 5-foot-4, 139-pounder with a heart that could practically match his frame and who played center for the football team the previous fall if you could believe that, put his arms back behind his head as he walked away from the 1-1 tie at that point.

Jason Anderson nailed his kick past Martinez to give Trinity a 2-1 lead. Crescent City's third kicker was Robles, who nailed his kick past Watkins to tie it at 2-2, but John Paglia sent the Celtics ahead with another high shot out of the reach of the 5-foot-7 Martinez. Crescent City's Ernique Benitez stepped up and he delivered a penalty kick goal away from Watkins to tie again at 3-3. Still, Martinez was not stopping anything and when Mike Zacco sent a screamer out of the reach of Martinez and into the net to make it 4-3, the clock was nearing midnight in Crescent City's season.

It was up to Villegas to keep the season going. He surveyed the situation, then drilled a shot past a helpless Watkins to make it 4-all. Villegas had done his job. Now it was up to Martinez to do his.

The last kicker of the regular round of shooters was steady defensive player Austin Ankney. Martinez was still jumping around, getting himself motivated -- and maybe trying to psyche out the last Trinity kicker. Ankney stepped up, delivered the kick and, boom! It went out of the reach again of Martinez to his right. The ball tickled the netting behind.

Trinity Catholic players stormed the field to mob Ankney, then Watkins, who made the one save possible for the Celtics to move on to the next round of the state tournament.

Raider players moped around the Trinity field afterward. The one who hurt the most in the end was the likeable Buenaventura as the tears showed. For that moment, he felt as if he let his team down and was the reason why it lost. No, that was not the case. Crescent City never took control of this game and never put a threat out there in the 100 minutes it did play to even think it had a chance to advance.

The record will always say the Raiders lost the game on penalty kicks, 5-4, and that Buenaventura was the lone shooter who didn't score. But that's not the whole story of this one.

Trinity Catholic just wanted it a little more on this February evening. And Thomas sounded as ever hopeful for the future of the program, rather than despondent at that moment. After all, this was not how John Thomas did business.

"I thought it was a great game right to the end," Thomas would say afterward. "It's a bitter pill, but I've swallowed it before. But something like this is going to add to the kids' lives. It's something they'll never forget in their high school lives. I remember seeing tears in the eyes of our players after the loss (to Trinity) last year, too."

No emotion when he said that. Just realism. Almost anyone who has ever played in the Raider program and for Thomas has the highest respect for the man, and understandably so. Thomas is that example of what happens when you take a kid as a kid and let him develop into a young man.

"I gave it my all, my teammates gave it their all. we came up one goal short," Martinez said afterward. He never pointed blame at any individual. He was a senior who understood that this was life. And sometimes life isn't going to be fair, but you roll with the punches and how you respond from the adversity tells a lot about who you grow up to be.

No one would see, though, that it would take four years -- and a German transfer student named Veit Couturier who would add a little something to an Hispanic- and Mexican-based group of players -- before Crescent City would be back on top again, beating Keystone Heights, 1-0, to capture the District 4-3A tournament.

And Buenaventura? Well all he did was graduate No. 1 in his class at Crescent City that spring, then go off to get his degree in chemical engineering at North Carolina State. I felt horrible for that young man that night in Ocala, but it turns out that setback was only minor in the grand scheme of things in that young man's life.

Thomas is still the program's coach and recently, the Raiders won their third straight district championship. And with a 5-2 win over Gainesville P.K. Yonge in the opening round of the Region 2-2A tournament, the Raider boys became the first program in Putnam County history to win a state tournament game.

As for waiting for a state tournament win by a Putnam County program of any kind, I didn't have long to wait ultimately. In late April, almost three months later, Palatka High's softball team broke the skid at 21 straight games Putnam County sports teams lost in the state tournament, by not only winning a first-round state tournament game with Belleview, but following it up with wins over Groveland South Lake and Zephyrhills to make the state 4A Final Four in Plant City, a dramatic way to break the skid.

Fate was cruel that February 2006 night to Crescent City's young men, especially to an amazingly intelligent young man such as Patrich Buenaventura. The loss served as a life lesson. If this was the worst thing that happened to this team, bigger things were going to happen to them in life.

I'm sure they were better for that, too.

It sure was freezing cold on Super Bowl Sunday

Super Bowl Sunday, January 20, 1985. A day I would get into work after a women's college basketball game in nearby Lakewood, N.J., then turn my attention to watching the San Francisco 49ers strafe Dan Marino and the high-flying Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX.

I kind of expected it, and I wasn't the 49ers fan that I am now. My team back in the day was the Los Angeles Rams with coach John Robinson, quarterback Vince Ferragamo and superstar running back Eric Dickerson. But I had a strong admiration and respect for Bill Walsh and Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig and that whole team. In a sense, I wanted my Rams to be like the 49ers.

My Sunday was set. First was the women's college basketball game at nearby Georgian Court College that the Lions were playing on a rare Sunday. Since I was the only one working alongside the assistant editor in the department that night, it fell upon me to get to Lakewood, cover the game at the famed Casino building on campus of the all-girls school and head back down Route 9 to the paper that night.

It was a 2 p.m. start, so that allowed for plenty of time. As I turned the engine over of my 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle, I figured all was OK. I knew I needed some gas along the trip, so there would be a gas station I could stop in near the Toms River-Lakewood border along the way.

Oh, the challenges that were about to face me.

The biggest challenge was the weather. It was downright freakin' cold. Temperatures were about 10 degrees and it had snowed a few days earlier, so the snow that remained on the ground with the exception of the road was all ice. But I had to be aware of ice patches on the ride.

The one thing I wasn't aware of was how my 12-year-old car ran. Now I had gotten this car practically for free from my family's next-door neighbor the week I began my two-year stint at Ocean County College. The neighbor, a terrific guy named Mike, was a pastor who moved with his family in from Missouri. He had this brown bomber, as I called it, and he was trying to get rid of it in some way. My family was more than delighted to take it off his hands, and I'll admit, for the two-plus years I had the car, it got me quite a few places in New Jersey and to quite a few assignments.

The one thing I had no understanding was how exactly a car worked. And as an 18-year-old in January 1985, I figured it was all just about putting gas in the car and letting it do its thing.

I soon found out on this nightmarish afternoon it isn't all about that.

The ride itself was pretty simple. Down Hooper Avenue until getting to Shorrock Road and then a turn onto Route 70 west toward Route 9. But by the time I got past Buckelew's Restaurnt near the Route 70-9 intersection, I suddenly realized the car was acting up. It made it to the top of the small hill at the intersection and the car turned off.

Hmmmmm. Let's turn the car back on again, which I was able to do with a couple of cranks. So off on Route 9 it went. But as I slowly got toward the downtown area/main area of Lakewood, the car was starting to act up once again. And as it shut down just as I approached Paul Kimball Hospital, I knew I'd better get to a gas station quickly. This time, though, the car wasn't going anywhere.

It sat right on the shoulder of two-lane highway Route 9 dead to the world, across from Paul Kimball, me figuring out, "Well if something happens to me, they can just wheel a gurney across the street. Ha-ha-ha!"

But when the car isn't on, it's getting cold. And 10 degrees is what it is -- 10 degrees! Add a slight wind chill, and it was near zero degrees. Not very comfortable to say the least.

The next step was to collect enough change to call my folks on a pay phone in the lobby at Kimball and let them know I broke down.

Telling them anything bad summons up thoughts that I've been taken hostage, gagged and forced against my will to tell them if they don't send the money quickly that this might be the last conversation my captors will allow me to have with them.

Well, except my mom. God only knows how strong a woman she is. She told me to hang in and she and my dad would be there. Well, hell, I don't have a running car ... it's not like I've got a whole lot of places to go!

I was forced to wait on that street corner across from the hospital for them -- hands in my pocket doing the best I can to keep from my fingers being completely frost-bitten and my feet doing its best to keep warm despite the circumstances of icy snow on the ground.

I couldn't pick a 75-degree day for this to happen. Nooooooooooooo! It had to be on one of the coldest days of the winter.

About a half hour later, they arrived. And the first thing they had to do was try to get the car started. Nothing. Nothing was going to work. By this point, a couple of kind folks in the neighborhood were good enough to help me and my dad move the car off of Route 9 and onto a side street.

This was about 15 minutes of time and any hope I had of covering coach Bob Sonday's Georgian Court basketball team went out the door. Meanwhile, being out in the cold was taking a toll on my fingers. Of course, I didn't have a pair of gloves on me for this day. Figured I was getting in and out of the car and heading in and out of the building where the game was. What time was I going to be in the cold and elements?

Needless to say, we had to find out where the closest service station was. And thanks to my mom who had some familiarity with this one Sunoco station right across from Lake Carasaljo on Route 9, we were able to give them a phone call from the same hospital lobby. They would be on their way.

The problem was that even though they were right up the road, it didn't mean they were going to be there absolutely right away. And being outside for a long period of time was really making things uncomfortable. Hey, this was my responsibility, I had to take the bullet by being out in the elements instead of staying in a nice, warm car. And each time the car keys would fall to the snow because my frost-bitten fingers couldn't get the darn things into my coat pocket, I can just feel my father's anger building to keep them in there and don't pull them out! Dad wasn't the best at crisis management at that time.

It took less than a half hour for the tow truck to get there and less than 2 minutes for the guy to figure out that a) I didn't have gas in the car, and b) I didn't have any oil in the car either. In the case of the lack of gas, I had been having difficulty understanding the gas gauge and what the total amount of gas there was, so even when I got to the bottom of the tank, it wasn't as apparent. And in the case of the oil, that was just me being stupid for never checking the oil, which now is a religious thing with me.

By the time I signed the papers to have the work done and by the time I heard my folks lecturing me on the privileges of owning a car and taking care of it, I was nearly thawed out as I got back home to Toms River.

I had to borrow mom's car to go to work that night, take whatever notes from the game I was supposed to be at from coach Sonday and then write a short story. Though I wasn't enamored with my assistant boss for the time he was there, he understood what happened. Got whatever I got done and saw my prophecy play out on television that night through the words of Frank Gifford, Joe Theisman and Don Meredith on ABC.

Final score: 49ers 38, Dolphins 16. Knew the Dolphins couldn't hang with the 49ers.

It was a good night. And everything went as planned and I got out at a decent hour. The next afternoon, I picked my car up at that Sunoco station, paid $34 for the service and learned a valuable lesson.

Never ignore your car! Yeah, I still have a problem with that from time to time, but I learned to make sure there's gas in it now. I haven't broken down due to a lack of gas again.

Because no one wants to run out of gas when temperatures are barely above zero.

An emotional state championship run in Tampa

Never in my journalism career was I assured of something quite like this. So assured, in fact, that I prepared months in advance.

In late July 2004, I was sitting in our two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, me in front of the computer, my girlfriend doing some cleaning in the kitchen. We had been moved in for a month and a lot of things were still new and exciting to us at the time.

While I was filing through different Web sites to look up things, I decided to look up the Florida High School Athletic Association's site to see when state tournaments were taking place. In this particular school year in Florida, things were starting earlier than normal. So I looked up the date for the FHSAA cross country championships.

Well, they were going to be held in the same place they were the year before, Ed Radice Park in Tampa. I was there for the 2003 state championship runs. Then I pinpointed the date and time for the race I was interested in particularly.

It was 5 p.m., Saturday, November 6. Once I had a date, the next step was a bit on the radical side.

"Hey hon," I said. "We're going to spend a weekend in Tampa in November."

Now my dear lady could've looked at me like I had three heads attached to my torso as to why I would plan something just over three months away. Then I told her that more than likely, I was going to be back at Radice Park for the state 2A championship and I decided we should make a weekend of it.

She, like a lot of women I've ever been with, appreciated when plans could be made in advance. I'm not sure how much she totally appreciated making plans this far in advance ... and that it'd be a partial working vacation ... but she was pretty much down with it.

At this point, we had been going out for five months and everything in a new relationship is well, new, exciting and fresh. I'm certain that if we had made these plans, say, four years into the relationship, she may not have wanted to go. Actually, I'm pretty certain she would not have wanted to go.

I guess I have experience with women's moods.

So the next step was calling a hotel that I had stayed in six years earlier when I was living in New Jersey and used in Clearwater Beach while on vacation called the Spyglass. They were great for the time I was there, so I was excited. They gave me a sixth-floor view of the Gulf of Mexico then and they were going to give me the same view again.

All done.

Now why was I so assured that I was going to be in Tampa that weekend to cover the FHSAA cross country championships? Because our main representative in Putnam County was Interlachen High School senior Jeremy Criscione, a three-time All-Putnam County run champion who was also the defending district champion and finished sixth in the 2003 state 2A championship.

And from time to time in the summer, I'd find out how he was training for the upcoming season. He was pretty darned committed to his work, which made me believe that, barring injury, he was making a return trip to the state 2A championship.

Beside, even if he didn't, she and I had a weekend getaway. Remember: New, exciting and fresh.

Cut to a week and a half later. It is August 9, 2004, a Monday afternoon milling around the apartment. My boss calls me up with sobering news: Dwayne Cox, a longtime coach at Interlachen High, had passed away.

Cox had been a football and softball coach at Interlachen High in the 1990s, but for the last 10 years, he had been coach of the IHS cross country teams. And his positive attitude was what sold Criscione to come out for running as a lanky 14-year-old freshman. Now as a senior, his leader -- his coach -- was gone.

This could have changed everything for the first week of November in a negative way. But I had a feeling young Jeremy was going to use this as a motivator.

Three days later, Cox's service was held at a church in downtown Palatka, the town he had adopted as his home after college. Everyone who knew Dwayne Cox was there from fellow coaches and teachers to current and past pupils and student-athletes to friends and family. The church was packed. I can still remember Charlie Overturf from the funeral home and who was handling the arrangements telling me at the church that the service had not started yet and pointed me upstairs in this large house of prayer.

For the next hour, friends and peers spoke glowingly about a man I barely knew, but knew enough to be a friend to those who came around him and a positive influence. By the end of that hour, I felt like I knew this man all my life. Before he had passed, I had seen him with his lovely wife Sylvia outside the newly built Quizno's Subs as they were coming in and I was going out in late June. And before that, I had covered him with cross country and junior varsity softball.

He could be cantankerous and we butted heads when it came to what he called in to the newspaper when it came to junior varsity softball results -- JV softball for goodness sake! But I understood his point of view. He wanted to make sure that everyone that played for him knew he had their best interest.

After this wonderful service, I came down to the floor level to see people I knew there. I saw Criscione and a good amount of his cross country teammates and they looked somewhere between glum and non-committal to their emotions. But he assured me he was all right. Then I paid my respects to Sylvia and daughter Chrissie. I didn't really know Chrissie that well, but I knew Mrs. Cox somewhat.

She was still sad and had gone through her crying spells throughout the service, but was still appreciative of the people who were coming up to her wishing her well and asking if there was anything they could do to help.

It was my turn and she knew me and hugged me. Then I did something I never had planned on doing -- I moved my mouth to her ear and said this to her.

"Your husband's last great sports accomplishment in coaching is coming November 6."

She smiled, but had no idea what I was talking about. Then I told her that was the date of the state cross country championship.

That was August 12. Now cut to November 6.

Criscione had gone through the season unscathed, winning every race he competed in, including a dominating fourth straight county championship meet at West Putnam Recreation Center. On a slippery course at a park in Bronson, he repeated his district championship run, then outrun a young man named Scott Macklay of Lakeland Kathleen High by six seconds to win the Region 2-2A championship at Lecanto High School.

Remember that trip to Tampa made in July? Well now we were going to Tampa on a pleasure and business trip.

So the morning of the 6th, the girlfriend and I woke up at around 8:30. We had planned to be gone for a couple of days so we did light packing. By about 10, we were on the road, stopping off in Ocala along the way to eat at Cracker Barrel, her favorite restaurant to eat at while on the road.

Somewhere along the ride down to the Tampa Bay area, a car or truck hit a small rock and it pelted my windshield. It caused a small crack that I would ultimately have to fix, gladly for free thanks to Florida insurance laws.

Along the ride, though, I had tried to reach the hotel we were going to stay at. So did my lovely lady. Nothing. The phone just kept ringing and ringing and ringing.

By about 2 p.m., we had arrived in Clearwater Beach and proceeded to the hotel to find out why we didn't get an answer.

We saw the boarded-up hotel. This was the year of the hurricane in Florida. It started with the devastation Charley had done to southwestern Florida in August. That was followed by Frances and Jeanne in September. And now, she and I were walking into the hallway of the Days Inn next door that was open, the hotel I stayed at in November and December 1995 when I made my first trip to Florida in 26 years.

I asked what happened to the hotel next door and they said the hurricanes really did damage to it and that ruined the tourist season at that time.

Greaaaaaaaaat! Now it's 2:30 p.m., we're just two and a half hours from the race in Tampa and we have nowhere to stay. Thankfully, the Days Inn was nice enough to give us a room for the same rate that I would have gotten at the Spyglass. Our room overlooked the gulf like the other hotel's room was supposed to, so we were pleased.

After finally settling in, we didn't have a lot of time to relax. It was turning around and heading back the other way to the mainland and to the race. We jumped on State Road-60 over the causeway, back to I-275 and off at the Dale Mabry exit where we immediately stopped at Wal-mart to pick up some food and drink for the ride.

We were making good time heading to the park when we made the turn to the street leading into the park. Traffic slowed to an absolute crawl heading in. It was about 4:45 p.m. when we slipped into the park. As I can see the course on my left and time was wasting away, my significant other had an idea.

"Get out of the car," she demanded. "I'll park it."

"You sure?"

"Yeah! Go!!"

I grabbed what I needed to grab and headed to the building where journalists and photographers were to upload their works for their publications. At the headquarters, I ask for my credentials, telling the man behind the desk specifically, "It's Blumenthal. Starts with a 'B.' Palatka Daily News." I had made the online arrangements earlier in the week to get the credentials prepared for me when I got there.

He couldn't find them. And now I was in a hurry to get to the start of the race without an official FHSAA press pass. Great! Just what I need.

So now I had to fill out paperwork and the credential itself before the race. Thankfully, the race time had been pushed back a few minutes, so by the time I got everything settled and found my way back to the course, the runners were set to go. They were starting from a distance near where I was and as the go-ahead to start was made, they were being told to go back to the start.

Seems this was the second false start of the race and that I missed the first one. Usually I try to make contact with someone who I knew and was involved with the runners before the race, but traffic and this credentials snafu mucked everything up.

On the third attempt, all went without a hitch. I knew to look for Criscione as well as Macklay. There would also be Miami Gulliver Prep's Bryan Sharkey and Miami Belen Jesuit's Eduardo Arguello to watch out for, too. But the young man to beat was Tampa Jesuit's Andrew Biladeau, the defending champion and an all-around nice young man who would eventually go on to a nice running career at the University of Virginia.

Criscione's plan of attack in this race was to be more conservative, not be a rabbit and then slow down during the race, which was what happened in 2003. And as the race began, he got out with the front pack, but he didn't get out to a lead. He held back.

As I finally had everything settled, I finally spotted his coach, Ed Mingle, the man who had the daunting task to follow up Cox as coach that season. There's a reason why I call the man "Easy Eddie." He just lets a lot roll off him and he takes things in stride, even a big race like this. But he knew this was a huge race and things seemed much different now.

What a way to finish up your first year as the program's coach ... at the state 2A meet.

In the crowd, I spotted Brandi Newman, the Putnam County girls champion from Interlachen, as well as a couple of teammates. Also there for support was Enoch Nadler, a freshman at the University of Florida who had been not just a rival for Criscione for three years, but was also one of his closest friends and training buddies. And IHS athletic director Doug Feltner, who was close friends with Cox, was there as well.

Now I had familiarity and I was just off the course to see what was happening in front of me. I knew the girlfriend would do a good job in finding a parking spot.

In the second mile of the race, Criscione had passed up Macklay, who was not quite used to the pace of this pack compared to the week before. He picked off both Sharkey and Arguello.

Before you knew it on this beautiful, 71-degree night, it was just him and his rival for what would be a two-mile tussle. They both stayed in stride with one another throughout. But once they went into the artificially-lit woods area, no one really knew what was happening. All of us there to either root for Criscione or to cover him were just having faith in him that he was handling this race just fine.

Moments later at the back of the loop, I can see the two runners and I can hear the excitement from the people who had made it to the race from western Putnam County: Criscione was leading going into the final 400 meters. Five years later, Criscione would tell me that he had heard someone say, "Do it for Coach Cox!" and that was the motivation he needed to take it to another level.

After a close race with the defending state 2A champion, Criscione was now dictating how this final scene was going to play out. Above the finish line, I can see the time ticking away.

14:40. 14:41. 14:42. 14:43.

And he was nearing the finish line. Yes, the finish line! Criscione had made it a regular thing to run in the mid-to-upper 15-minute range, but his fastest time of the year was 15:24 at the region meet. Now he was on line to obliterate that time on this fast, flat course.

I readied myself near the finish line as he crossed it. But with the darkness in the backdrop and my camera not handling the speed as well as I'd like it to, I missed the winning shot as he came across the finish line in first place in 15 minutes and two seconds.

Yes, 15:02, a new 3.1-mile (5K) record for the state meet. The excitement was apparent.

The raw emotion was what I did not expect. I turned around and there were his friends happy. And there was Brandi Newman already balling her eyes out. She truly understood what this win meant. She, like Criscione, was a diehard runner who had honed her skills under Cox's tutelage.

This wasn't just Jeremy Criscione's win. This was Brandi Newman's win, too.

And this was Dwayne Cox's win.

His last win, even if he wasn't there to enjoy the rewards in person.

It would not be another 30 to 45 minutes before I would be able to speak to the champion. He had all the commitments with the state sports network, Sunshine Sports, and he was doing numerous interviews with other outlets, including one with the meet director as he fed him questions and Criscione, exhausted, did his best to answer them.

Meanwhile, Biladeau was a gracious runnerup. He knew he didn't lose the race. He gave credit to the new champion. All hail the new champion.

I finally spotted my girlfriend. She was smiling. And suddenly it hit me. All the emotion of this moment, all the drama that led to this particular night.

This meant everything to the Criscione family. But it meant more to those who knew Dwayne Cox, that positive influence in a young 14-year-old's life in 2001. He had a state champion in spirit.

I finally had the chance to talk to Criscione moments after he had that gold medal placed around his neck by Mingle, who realized the moment was bigger than he could have ever imagined. I nearly lost it asking that first question and how much that victory meant to him, his friends, his IHS teammates and then to the memory of Coach Cox.

How to this day he answered my questions with a straight face, I still am amazed by it. Here's a young man who just won the biggest race of his life and yet, he kept everything in the proper perspective without breaking down, maintaining a straight-line mentality on the answers that whole time.

No emotion to talk about from the winner. I'm thinking, "What a bummer!" But then I realized everything around him provided the backdrop to the ultimate story. And if he was in the vacuum away from all that emotion, away from the storylines that were developed that whole season -- starting with Dwayne Cox's death in August -- it may have been better than being affected by it.

I had my story notes, I had my official results and eventually had a great weekend in Clearwater Beach with my significant other, going out after the race to Pete And Shorty's in Clearwater, then to the IHOP the next morning on Clearwater Beach.

When I had a chance to finally have distance from that magical night, this was the greatest high school sports moment I had ever covered ... bigger than Lacey's 1994 NJSIAA Group III field hockey championship upset of three-time champion West Essex, bigger than that night in 1985 when Rich Siegler outswam Terence Donnelly in the final 100 meters of the 400-yard freestyle to give Toms River East an unlikely Shore Conference Tournament title over Toms River South, bigger than that June morning in 1996 when Robin Pepper stepped in for an injured Kristy Tice and delivered Central Regional -- and Ocean County -- its first state softball title.

It was both amazing and emotional. Nothing, I've said, can top that night in my career on a prep sports level.

It was proven in 2005 when after 21 years in this business, I won my first two sports writing awards, a second-place finish at the Florida Sports Writers Association for best story in my division, and a first-place finish with the Florida Press Club for best story in my division. Those plaques -- like the ones I'd win in the future -- are well kept in my closet still to this day.

Five years later, we did a ranking of the 20 greatest prep sports moments of the 2000 decade in Putnam County history and that state championship was No. 1. Rightfully so, too. And those emotions sparked a phone call for me when I came into work that Monday afternoon after the story had been in the paper on Saturday, January 2, 2010.

It was Sylvia Cox, who I had not talked to in six years. She did not want to go to the state meet that night in Tampa because the emotions were too powerful for her. But now she was telling me that I had brought those emotions back to the forefront after reading my story. And it brought a tear to my eye listening to her tell me about those times with her husband and with Jeremy and with the team. She was having a difficult time holding back her sobs.

It was a pretty intense phone call. I didn't expect it. And she updated me on what had happened in her life and she finally admitted to me things that had happened surrounding that time period that I had only heard rumors. It was a great 20-minute conversation.

And so as Jeremy Criscione, who went on to be a four-time national qualifier for the NCAA Championships in his career at the University of Florida and has since married and waits on the arrival of he and his wife's first child, and chases down a dream to be an Olympic marathon runner, I am reminded of the night he gave me and all those in attendance at that park in Tampa a moment that we will never forget.

I hope he makes it to the Olympic team one day. I want to get a chance to say I covered an Olympic runner. I already can say I've covered an Olympic soccer player (Christie Pearce Rampone) in my life. Maybe I might even cover him in person in the Olympics someday.

Either way, though, it'd be hard to top that November night in 2004. How do you top the storylines and the drama surrounding a state championship like that one?

Especially when you expected something amazing to happen months in advance.