Overtime Steve

On Thursday I announced a two-overtime girls basketball game. It is the third overtime game I’ve announced this year, and the second two-overtime game I’ve announced since the season started a month ago.

Add the overtime college football game I announced in September, and since the 2015-16 seasons began in August, I have announced four overtime games totaling six overtime periods. (Or, as I call them, borrowing from the late Braves announcer Skip Caray “free (insert sport name here).”) I announced a playoff game with the boys counterpart of one of last night’s participants back in March. That game went to overtime too.

I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise in one sense, because the first football game I ever announced went to overtime. (Cuba City 28, Lancaster 27, 1988.) I recall at least two basketball games that year going to overtime as well.

Before that, I was in the band for the most famous UW basketball overtime game, the triple-overtime loss to Indiana in 1987:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=binw0gwBsto

There was no college football overtime in those days, but I attended nine UW hockey games that went to overtime. Wisconsin won all nine. The most harrowing was probably the last one, in 1988, when North Dakota scored the game-winning goal only to have it waved off because the stick was above the waist of the boy named Sioux. Moments later, the Badgers scored on a drop-pass and a long shot.

The first overtime I remember was on Christmas Day 1971, when whatever I wanted to watch was preempted by the longest NFL game in history:

There are two different kinds of overtimes — the overtimes that include the words “sudden death” (NFL, hockey before the shootout) and those that don’t (basketball, although you can win on an overtime buzzer-beater).

Though I don’t remember this, the Packers’ first playoff game after my birth was an overtime game:

I was, however, at the Packers’ next overtime playoff game, 39 years later:

Hockey playoff overtimes, particularly NHL playoff series-ending overtimes or NCAA playoff overtimes, define sudden death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otGhTszcS3s

The 1974 NBA Finals featured a thrilling double-overtime game between the Bucks and the Boston Celtics …

… the overtimes of which I didn’t get to see because my mean parents made me go to bed at the end of regulation. (The benefit of that was nonexistent since Dad kept running into the bedroom to update us on the overtimes.)

Baseball can have either version. Three friends and I contributed to the ear-splitting din at Miller Park in 2008:

That came 25 years after the first extra-inning baseball game I ever saw — Brewers 2, Orioles 1 on an 11th-inning home run by Rick Manning. One of my newspaper awards is for a game story about a 12-inning sectional semifinal baseball game. It wasn’t because of my flowery writing; the award was for my covering all the things that happened in the game. (Including one sequence where a baserunner stole second, went to third on the bad throw to second base, then was thrown out at the plate, then was thrown out of the game for spiking his batting helmet.)

One overtime game I covered should be called the Bad Sausage Bowl, the Madison La Follette-Madison West game of 1987 whose overtime I missed because the pizza I ate that day made a return appearance, forcing me to listen to the public address announcement of the overtime while puking from the top row of Warner Park.

The happier version came two decades later, a playoff football game between Ripon and Chilton made possible only because of a Hail Mary pass:

In the overtime, Chilton got a touchdown but missed the extra point. Ripon got a touchdown and kicked the extra point.

The appeal of an overtime game is obvious. You have the drama of someone prepared to go all out 60 minutes, or nine innings, only to have that not be enough. (That’s particularly dramatic in basketball, where high school and college players foul out on their fifth foul even if it occurs in overtime.) Scores and other statistics are outsized, particularly in college football, which awards one possession per team per overtime period. The high of winning is even higher for an overtime win, and the low of losing is even lower for an overtime loss.

There’s also the surreality of being somewhere later than you’re supposed to be, but the game’s still going on. After the Mets and Braves played deep into the night after Independence Day 1985 …