David Haftield writes: >greenie <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >>In a way I almost kind of wish that no Boston team would have made it to >>the final four this year, as the house would have been filled only with >>solid hockey fans and not bandwagon jumpers. Now *that* would have been the >>best way to judge if Boston is "hockeytown" or not. >Hmmm...I'm not sure how to interpret this statement. This seems to imply >that all college hockey fans rooting for Boston-based teams are >fair-weather bandwagon jumpers. While I have absolutely no data to back >this up, I would argue that this is totally untrue! I don't dispute the >stories about some of the local fan's interest being driven by who was >playing. I think this list is unduly harsh towards fans whose interest in the Frozen Four is dependent on whether their team is in it. Looking at things from the opposite perspective, you have to respect someone who makes a trip to a tournament they would not otherwise have attended, in order to follow their team. That said, criticism of folks who waited to get tickets to the final *game* until they knew who'd be in it (which is really what Greenie was talking about) is well-placed. If you're attending an event, it's good form to watch all of the games once you're there. And waiting to secure tickets to the final until your team's semifinal is over, when your team is the local favorite, is just plain boneheaded. It also seems to me like the NC$$ is just begging for people to sell off their tickets by making everyone buy tickets for all three games, and then turning around and 1) Putting a long break between the two semifinals so that they're separate events 2) Printing up tickets for all three games and not just a single pass (I believe the tickets from Milwaukee even had individual-game prices printed on them, even though you couldn't buy them that way) 3) Not having a consolation game, so that two of the four teams are done on Thursday Compare a typical four-game tournament (alas, none of the four conferences ran their tournaments this way) where each day the two games are held one after the other on the same ticket, and all four teams play both days. That really encourages fans to attend every game. Of course, conference tournaments don't sell out, so the same group of people can fit in the building all at once. Scheduling the Frozen Four as three separate one-game events lets the maximum number of people see the games they want to see. John Whelan, Cornell '91 <[log in to unmask]> <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/joe.html> Learn about the NCAA selection process on the web at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?pairwise HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.