Despite the fact that the Bay Area is hosting the regional final of the NCAA basketball tournament this week, I was planning to catch the games on TV. UCLA is one of the four teams in this bracket, naturally I was looking forward to the games. Tickets are notoriously hard to get, so I didn’t think about going to the games until my friend Joe called and suggested getting tickets. Joe found out that tickets unused by some of the schools will be available the day before the games.

So Joe & I headed down the HP Pavilion to try our luck scoring tickets. We lined up and each got a wristband with a number which unfortunately doesn’t guarantee us tickets. It just means we’ll get a chance! We both headed to a local Cajun restaurant for lunch and returned 90 minutes later when the tickets start going on sale. To discourage people camping out and get ahead of the line, they don’t go with the sequence numbers handed out. Instead they pick a random starting number and start from there. With our luck, the random number is ended up something like 50 after our number. This means we are one of the last 50 people in a line of hundreds! Not good…

They wouldn’t tell us up front how many tickets were available. So with the line so long, we both decided our chances were slim. We decided to give up. I tore up my wristband in despair and drove back to work. Half an hour later, I got an email from Joe’s Blackberry– he’s decided to stay it out after hearing from somebody that there’re a large # of tickets available. Joe’s patience paid off as he ended up scoring a pair of tickets.

We’re going to the games. It has been years since I went to an UCLA game. Awesome!