It’s going to be another great weekend for college hoop fans as NCAA March Madness builds to a fever pitch with regional championship action – another great weekend for those outside the Bangor TV viewing area, that is.

WABI-TV (Channel 5) in Bangor will press the pause button on connoisseurs of the college game Saturday as it plans to bypass the NCAA regional championships in favor of live coverage of the McDonald’s East-West Senior All-Star high school basketball games at Husson College in Bangor.

Instead of watching the winner of the Missouri-Syracuse game play the Louisville-Arizona survivor at 3:40 p.m. in the West final, or the Marquette-Duke winner take on either Purdue or Kansas at 6 p.m. in the Southeast final, viewers will have to settle for the end of the Classes C-D boys game and the A-B boys and girls games.

“When you stack up all the factors, the benefits of doing these games outweighed the negatives of not carrying the NCAA games,” said Mike Young, sales manager at WABI.

“We decided to do these since we have a 48-year history of doing local basketball games. We thought these kids deserved some attention and Ronald McDonald Charities could use the exposure.”

Young said the contract for the games calls for broadcasts this year, with a renewable option (to WABI) for the 1995 games.

Neither Marilyn Jaffe, WABI’s general manager, nor Steve Hiltz, program director, could be reached for comment Tuesday night.

Relief will be available for those not wanting to miss a single NCAA tournament basket or foul. Several local bars and restaurants will show the games on their satellite television systems.

Both Legends Sports Restaurant and Pub and The Ground Round Restaurant in Bangor will have the games on their big screens.

David Murray, a bartender and host at The Ground Round, welcomed the news that Channel 5 would be pre-empting both of Saturday’s games.

“We like to hear that,” he said. “We’ve had real good crowds the last two weeks, and we should be very busy with the Sweet 16 games on this week – especially if they’re not on regular TV.”

Legends owner Frank Jordan was also ecstatic.

“I think it’s great,” Jordan said. “This is awesome for us. We get all the games on direct satellite feeds. We had three different games on at once most of the time last week.”

Jordan said he could remember similar situations cropping up in the past where people jammed his bar to watch games not shown on broadcast TV.

“There were a couple of weekends during football season when the Giants weren’t being shown here, and we had a lot of Giants fans come in.”

Another possible remedy – although it may be a long shot – is another local station (WVII-TV, Channel 7 or WLBZ-TV, Channel 2) picking up the games.

“Really, I didn’t know that,” said WVII Program Director Jim Reed, upon first hearing of WABI’s decision Tuesday night.

“I will definitely look into (picking the games up) first thing tomorrow morning.”