The other day, I was thinking about when I was about 11 or 12 years old and I had a calendar up on my wall in my room.  By no means was it any kind of special calendar, in fact it could have been self-made.  On it, I had stripes of green and stripes of blue.  The green stripe signified a Minnesota North Stars game on the radio, and the blue stripe meant there was a Minnesota Timberwolves game on the radio.  On a few occaisions, both stripes were on the calendar, and then I had tough decisions to make.

Neither of the teams were any good back then, the T-Wolves were a fresh expansion franchise which was struggling to hit 90 with players like Randy Breuer and Pooh Richardson.  The North Stars made their Stanley Cup run in the spring of ’92, but they were one of the worst teams in the NHL at a time when 16 of the 21 franchises made the playoffs.

Either way, every night I fell asleep to the Stars or the Wolves every night in my pre-teen years.  I guess that solidified my sports-dorkiness.  There’s a lot more where that came from though, like how I used to sleep in my baseball uniform, or write letters to Tom Kelly (the then manager of the Twins) with my ideas of lineups he could try out.  I also created a large football field out of paper, and made 11 little Viking players and 11 little Los Angeles Rams players (because I loved the Rams uniforms).

Hi, I’m Mat, and I’m a Sports Dork.