Dean Shalhoup

Piecing together enough stray flashes of memory to come up with some sort of at least fairly coherent stretch of recollections certainly ain’t as easy as it used to be.

(I can hear my dear departed Nana sighing and warning me once again, “stop saying ain’t!” British born and raised, Nana was a stickler for proper English).

But some memories, for some reason, seem to answer the call quicker and with more detail than others. Why that is I don’t know, but I bet any one of us could find the answer in one of those magazines stacked on tables in the doctor’s waiting room.

But rather than thumb through dog-eared magazines not knowing what I’m looking for, and hoping I don’t happen to come across a story about an incurable disease whose symptoms look strangely familiar, I’ve turned my attention to one of the coolest things that March has to offer: Basketball tournaments.

Indeed, post-season play of any type in any sport is like finally getting to the creme of a double-stuffed Oreo, your reward for chomping patiently through the crumbling cookie that is the regular season.

At the college level, the majority of each March is devoted to a brief but joyously hectic and often thrilling season dubbed “March Madness,” which now features a field of 136 teams — 68 men’s and 68 women’s teams — each and every one of which goes into battle sincerely believing they have what it takes to piece together a string of 7 victories, no matter what the experts — the so-called “bracketologists” — say.

Now throw in gradually warming weather conditions and the annual party-fest called St. Patrick’s Day. What’s not to love about March?

When it comes to the high school version of March Madness, we Granite Staters of a certain age can recall a time when our respective home teams played our state tournament games at a venue that was in many ways the polar opposite of the one we’ve grown accustomed to over the past 56 or so Marches.

That would be “The Gymnasium at the University of New Hampshire Field House,” better known since 1968 as the Carl Lundholm Gymnasium, even better known as simply the Lundholm gym.

While the original gym did in fact host some schoolboy tourney games before it was renovated and dedicated to Lundholm, most of those were among the state’s smaller schools. This was back when the schools were divided by size – Class A, Class B and Class C – before the NHIAA went to the Class L (large), Class I (intermediate), Class M (medium) and Class S (small) format, which, for the record, was this scribe’s favorite system.

Somewhere around a dozen years ago the “division” format was enacted, doing away with our rather unique L, I, M and S system, apparently for purposes of conformity.

The “polar opposite venue” I mentioned earlier? That would be the New Hampshire State Armory in Manchester, which this former kid recalls as a dimly-lit, cavernous echo chamber with a temporary court that reminded one of an almost-finished jigsaw puzzle with more than a few “dead spots” that no doubt contributed to teams’ turnover totals.

Way back in 1950, the armory, at the time hosting the Class L – excuse me, Class A – quarterfinals, semifinalist and finals, was the site of Nashua’s tourney opener against Berlin, which was big enough back then to be in Class A.

Going into the tourney, the Purple was defending Class A champion, having beaten Manchester Central 50-33 at the armory, Central’s de facto home court.

Alas, Berlin won the ’50 prelim, which extended its several-year win streak against Nashua.

Yes, that’s correct – there was a time when the little, perpetually smoky city way up north had Nashua’s number.

Two years earlier, ahead of the 1948 Class A tourney, then-Telegraph sports editor Frank Stawasz set the scene.

“Manchester’s huge state armory is ready for the influx of teams, fans, officials and press … where the cream of the season’s scholastic hoop squads will parade before the most responsive audience of the entire campaign – the rabid tournament fan.”

Some 3,000 seats were wheeled in; 3,000 tickets would be printed, Stawasz wrote. A new scoreboard was being installed; apparently the first one crapped out during the previous Class B tourney.

As for that 1949 NHS championship, Stawasz and the Telegraph gave the hometown boys a nice send-off for the championship game, even running a photo of the NHS cheerleaders with a caption that you probably won’t see these days: “Better than Words: There’s no mistaking the story written in the faces of the attractive Nashua cheerleaders, captured by the Telegraph cameraman … it spells ‘victory.’ ”

Under the headline “City Goes Wild Over Court Team,”

Stawasz reported that “thousands of hometown followers were making frantic efforts to buy a ticket to the game.”

Fans, he wrote, had even begun “making overtures to followers of teams that had been eliminated from the competition, and offering big money for the tickets.

“Price was no object,” Stawasz noted. “All Nashua fans want to be in on the ‘kill.’ ”

For Nashuans whose ticket searches turned up empty, Stawasz said that the Telegraph would be “issuing play by play scores to anyone who calls this office between 8:30-10 p.m.”

Makes one wonder whether the callers, or the Telegraph staff volunteers fielding the calls, realized that they were among the first practitioners of a process we now know as information streaming.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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