Sports

It was a sold out game on a pure Southern California day.

"Isn't this beautiful? Blue sky, not a cloud in the air, nice little breeze," said Maury Wills, who was the Dodgers shortstop in 1962. "It's warm Southern California."

Wills joined a bunch of his old teammates Tuesday to celebrate Dodger Stadium's 50th anniversary. It's also the 50th anniversary of the Beach Boys. So they sang the national anthem after "Surfer Girl."

There’s a big showdown going on this weekend in the world of flat track roller derby. A New Hampshire team known as the Skate Free or Die All Stars are heading to New York for a bout billed as the Suburban Brawl.

This year's Final Four seems more like Best in Show at the Westminster. Such pedigree: Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio State and Louisville –– four of the very top dogs in the history of the sport. Well, it's a Meryl Streep kind of year, isn't it?

But if the Final Four might delight fans by giving them aristocracy in its teams, unfortunately the whole of college basketball is plagued by anonymity in its players, and external issues that have diminished the popularity of the game.

Good grief. This year, there has been more buzz about Mad Men than about March Madness.

Even the goofy students at Duke have stopped jamming little Cameron Indoor Stadium. And when the Dookies are losing interest in hoops, that's a clue that even Inspector Clouseau can't stumble past.

One thing that distinguishes most team sports is that the game is suddenly played differently at the end. Often, this adds to the fascination, too. Nothing, for example, gets a rise out of me like when the hockey goalie skates off the ice with a minute or so to go, his team down a goal, leaving an open net.

In championship soccer, tie games go to a shoot-out, which is totally alien with all that came before. Neat stuff.

In football, the team ahead suddenly goes into a prevent defense –– or "PREE-vent DEE-fense," as we pigskinners say –– even though playing an entirely different way the rest of the game is why it got ahead in the first place.

In baseball, the strategy may not change, but the personnel does. All kinds of new pitchers and pinch-hitters appear.

When it comes to athletics, homeschoolers want to make the team.

After a sometimes challenging regular season, the University of New Hampshire Wildcats mens team play their first round games in the Hockey East tournament this weekend.

Allen Lessels covers sports for the Union Leader. He recaps the Wildcats' season and previews this weekend's tournament with All Things Considered host Brady Carlson.

Coaches and managers, as a group, have always been pretty straightforward types. We don't think of generals or preachers as humorists — and, after all, that's pretty much what coaches are, a hybrid of the military and the pulpit.

But at least in the past, there were always a fair complement of coaching characters: old cracker-barrel philosophers, feisty wise guys and even a few sardonic intellectuals.

But the oddballs are diminishing. I think much of this has to do with the fact that sports has increasingly come to depend upon statistics, and so more and more coaches aren't skippers, as they've been, colloquially, in the past, but — for goodness sakes — programmers.