That Gonzaga-MSU game was truly an instant classic. Of all the remarkable things about it, what amazes me most is that neither team led by more than three points, EVER, during the final 15:32 of the second half or in any of the overtimes. It was a one-possession game for more than 30 consecutive minutes. I’ve never, ever seen anything like that before.

Zags win!!! WOW!!! What a game!!!

The Zags and Spartans are now in triple overtime, and both teams are playing GREAT. Nobody has led by more than three points for as long as I can remember. What a game!

Watching the Gonzaga game in the Fischer lounge. The Zags and Michigan State are in overtime in a game that has had a March-like feel. In other news, Bucknell upset Syracuse!

According to my friend and fellow Trojan (and SI writer) Arash Markazi, ESPN has announced that its GameDay crew will travel to the Rose Bowl for the USC-UCLA game in Pasadena on Dec. 3.

CORRECTION: The USC-UCLA game is at the Coliseum, not the Rose Bowl. Oops. I got the Trojans’ big rivalry game mixed up with Newington High School’s big rivalry game, which is on the road (at Wethersfield) this year. :)

The newly elected 18-year-old mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan was sworn in yesterday.

Heh:

A Leahy Lounge anonymous source has confirmed that Emmy-winning actor and cultural icon William Shatner is actively seeking to obtain both nuclear and biological weapons.

Does this mean Priceline.com is joining the axis of evil?

Somewhere, a CNN intern is getting fired. Heh.

WTIC Fox 61, citing law-enforcement sources, now confirms that former state trooper Victor Diaz shot and killed a Newington police officer in West Hartford tonight, and that the slain cop was indeed, as I speculated below, the officer who regularly patrols Newington High School. He She had been the “school resource officer” at NHS for five years, according to WTIC’s report. The report did not name the slain officer.

[UPDATE, 10:27 PM: The slain officer’s name is Ciara McDermott, according to Kim Stone (NHS Class of ‘05) and this website; see also here. Kim says the local news is reporting that Diaz was McDermott’s boyfriend, and that it was a murder-suicide: “He shot her then himself.”]

Adding trauma to tragedy, all of this happened while NHS students were holding a vigil for senior Brendan Horan, who died Friday in an ATV accident. The vigil for Horan was apparently interrupted by fears that the gunman might be en route to the high school, according to WTIC. There were apparently officers with machine guns guarding the area. “The school was in some sort of lockdown because of concerns that the shooter might be coming here,” a reporter stated on-air. [UPDATE: Obviously, those fears were unfounded, since it was a murder-suicide. But the police did not initially realize that, according to WTIC (via my dad). They did not find the second body immediately, and were initially operating under the assumption that the shooter was at large.] [ANOTHER UPDATE: The school-in-lockdown report may have been erroneous, if this comment is accurate. The police station was definitely in lockdown, however.]

All of this is strikingly reminisicent of an equally tragic week at Newington High School exactly eight years ago, when junior Bob Aniello committed suicide, freshman Jen Patridge was hit and killed by a car the next day, and several serious non-fatal car accidents and other incidents and rumors spurred a general sense that NHS had somehow descended into the pits of Hell. I imagine that the current batch of students must be feeling much the same way that we did back then. That Horan’s death occurred on November 18, the eighth anniversary of Bob’s death, only makes the parallel more eerie.

P.S. NHS students aren’t the only ones experiencing a double tragedy. The Newington police department must also be reeling. Just last December, Officer Peter Lavery was killed on New Year’s Eve. Now, three days before Thanksgiving, Officer Ciara McDermott joins him in the pantheon of fallen heroes.

UPDATE: NHS senior Katrina writes in comments, “She is the strongest woman most of us know and if something like that can happen to her, its hard to fathom anything. Most people are still in a daze.”

Ryan Barber, Newington High School Class of 1998, comments that “one of the officers who patrols NHS was shot tonight.”

That’s all I know at the moment, though I wonder if this is related:

Police are on a manhunt for a suspect in a homicide in West Hartford.

It happened at a home along Ridgewood Road.

Police say someone in law enforcement was involved in the incident.

I’ll post more when I know more.

This news comes hot on the heels of the tragic death of NHS senior Brendan Horan — which, it just now occurs to me, happened eight years to the day after Bob Aniello, who would have been in the Class of 1999, committed suicide. We were juniors at the time. Bob’s death was followed the very next day by a traffic accident that killed freshman Jen Patridge, who would have been in the Class of 2001. November 18 and 19, 1997 are thus forever etched in my memory.

Bad things seem to happen in groups in Newington. There were also two serious non-fatal car accidents that week in 1997, and a janitor reportedly had a heart attack. By the end of the week, there was a werid, apocalyptic feeling in the high school; we felt like the world was ending, or the place was cursed or something. I imagine the current group of NHS students must be feeling something a bit like that now.

UPDATE, 9:50 PM: The latest report from the Courant adds some detail which further suggests a connection between the West Hartford shooting and Barber’s comment. It also backtracks on the use of the term “homicide,” suggesting that the shooting may not have been fatal:

SWAT teams and police dogs were searching tonight for a suspect who shot a municipal police officer, state police said.

Sgt. J. Paul Vance, a state police spokesman, said a local police officer was shot, but he would not immediately name the officer, say what town the officer worked for or say how serious the person was wounded.

And apparently something else happened, too, though I have no idea what. Like I said: bad things seem to happen in groups in Newington.

UPDATE, 10:00 PM: This report says the suspect has been caught. It is still calling the incident a “murder.” Also, according to Google News, an earlier version of the report stated that “State Police and Newington Police have joined West Hartford Police in this investigation.” Yet another indication that Barber’s comment may be related to the developments in West Hartford. It’s not at all implausible to think that a Newington cop who patrols NHS might live in West Hartford. For those not familiar with Connecticut geography, the towns border one another.

UPDATE, 10:06 PM: Sources tell WTIC Channel 61 that former state trooper Victor Diaz shot and killed a Newington cop.

Confirmed: the victim was the school resource officer, who had been at the school for five years.

“The school was in some sort of lockdown because of concerns that the shooter might be coming here.” Officers with machine guns, etc.

A French woman on her way to Australia decided she wanted a smoke, so she attempted to open the door — while the plane was in flight. Thankfully, a flight attendant was able to restrain the (drunk) woman and put her back in her seat. Apparently she was just a bit under the influence:

Defense lawyer Helen Shilton told the court Sellies was terrified of flying and had taken sleeping tablets with alcohol before takeoff.

She was placed on AU$1000 bond, and told to behave herself. :)

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

#9-ranked Gonzaga beat #20 Maryland in the opening round of the Maui Invitational to earn a matchup with #12 Michigan State tomorrow night.

Incidentally, the Invitational is being held near Kaanapali, where Becky and I are going on our honeymoon!

In the wake of Miami’s stunning loss to the Rambling Wreck, predicted by Boi From Troy but few others, LSU is ranked #3 in all three human polls — AP, USA Today and Harris — but Penn State is #3 in the BCS thanks to a strong lead over LSU in the computer rankings. The Nittany Lions are #3 in the computers, whereas the Tigers are #8. Apparently the computers recognize what the pollsters do not: the SEC really isn’t very good this year.

What’s more, LSU’s margin over Penn State is decent-sized: .8900 to .8372. (By way of comparison, USC leads Texas by just .9807 to .9791.) In fact, LSU is much closer to being jumped by Virginia Tech (.8294) than it is to jumping Penn State. With the Lions’ season over, and the Tigers’ two remaining games roughly offsetting one another in terms of schedule-strength implications (playing Arkansas will hurt, playing Georgia will help), it seems that, barring a massive outbreak of cynical last-minute Texas/Cal-style vote-switching by the pollsters, Penn State is pretty much assured of finishing ahead of LSU, and has basically clinched the “top one-loss team” position.

If either USC or Texas loses, LSU fans may find themselves in the odd position of singing the praises of the human polls and bashing the computers. This may also lead to a sudden, widespread bout of temporary amnesia throughout the South regarding what happened in 2003. Irony, thy name is BCS. :)

Penn State’s ascendancy also means that, provided USC beats UCLA, we are a Texas loss away from a traditionalist’s dream Rose Bowl: the Pac-10 champion Trojans vs. the Big Ten champion Nittany Lions, for all the roses and all the marbles. Pasadena purists will be rooting hard for Texas A&M on Friday and, if the Aggies fail, for either Colorado or Iowa State on Dec. 3.

P.S. Assuming that the Longhorns and the Trojans win out… Stewart Mandel bucks conventional wisdom and guesses that the Fiesta Bowl will choose Oregon over Ohio State for the final BCS at-large spot (Notre Dame having gotten the first one) because the Buckeyes have played in Tempe two out of the last three years, and Oregon has one loss to Ohio State’s two. Yeah, but remember what happened the last time Notre Dame played a team from Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl? It wasn’t pretty. Then again, that was the Bob Davie era (and last year’s similarly ugly loss to an Oregonian team in the Phoenix metro area was the Ty Willingham era). This is the era of Choo Choo Charlie Weis, who would lick the Beavers and f*** the Ducks if he had the chance. GO IRISH! :)

On the other hand, for what it’s worth, this article quotes Fiesta Bowl selection committee chairman Alan Young as saying that an Irish-Buckeyes bowl “would be a great matchup. We’re just realizing that Notre Dame and Ohio State have only played four times. Stuff like that is attractive to us. That would be a good matchup.” It would also be a very interesting matchup for Alex Ho, the Irish Buckeye. Welcome to my world, buddy. :)

On the other hand, an “Irish Trojan” matchup remains possible. The same article also states that “the anchor teams for the Fiesta Bowl this year are the Big 12 and Pac-10 champions.” If it’s true that the Pac-10 is a “co-anchor” for the Fiesta because the Rose is hosting the championship — and what Boi From Troy is hearing from the USC ticket office seems to back this up — that would mean that a USC loss to UCLA (perish the thought) would definitely send the Trojans (who have already clinched the Pac-10’s BCS berth) to Tempe… quite possibly for a rematch with the Irish. After all, Penn State would be out of the mix; the Lions would be headed to Pasadena to face Texas in such a scenario. That would leave the Fiesta Bowl to choose between a USC-Oregon rematch, a USC-ND rematch, or a USC-Ohio State “pre-match” (the Trojans and Buckeyes are scheduled for a home-and-home series in 2008 and 2009). The latter would be the conventionally obvious choice (thus sending ND to Miami), but as discussed earlier, I’m not so sure that Irish vs. Trojans — a rematch of the “game of the century” — wouldn’t look awfully attractive, much moreso than the typical rematch, to anyone who cares about hype, TV ratings and ticket sales.

But of course, this is all academic, because USC is going to wipe the floor with UCLA in two weeks, and you can quote me on that.

Okay, back to work…

Okay, President Bush’s failed “escape” attempt in China yesterday was pretty damn funny — sort of a physical Bushism caught on video. But does it really belong on the front page of the New York Times? Heh.

#9-ranked Gonzaga, 1-0 after a not-terribly-impressive 69-60 win over Idaho on Friday, plays #24 Maryland tonight at 5:00 PM on ESPN2 in the first round of the Maui Invitational, which has a remarkably stacked field of teams. Here’s the bracket (PDF).

The Zags-Terps winner will most likely play #4 Michigan State tomorrow at 7:00 PM on ESPN. (The Spartans will soon drop in the polls, having been stunned 84-62 by Hawaii last night.)

UPDATE: In other news, Tim Floyd’s debut as USC men’s basketball coach did not go well. In contast, things are going better for the #24-ranked Women of Troy.