Call it the local sports radio version of ESPN Classic.

Local sports fans who would like to relive some of the most memorable local college and high school sports moments from the past eight years are about to have their prayers answered.

Officials at Bangor all-sports radio station WZON (620 AM) hope to debut their own localized version of a classic sportscast show in July. Sports Zone Classic Games, which will either air on a weekly or irregular basis, will feature some of the more defining contests in recent Maine sports history.

“We were talking about NESN [New England Sports Network] doing old games on Sundays and the whole ESPN Classic thing and we started thinking about all the memorable games we’ve done,” said Dale Duff, WZON’s program director. “That’s how we got the idea for this.”

Broadcasts such as the University of Maine’s victory over New Hampshire in the 1999 NCAA national championship hockey game will be re-aired over the coming months as WZON combs through its audio tape archives to unearth some of the station’s more memorable broadcasts.

“We’re having a little trouble locating tapes. We’ve got a lot of tapes here that we don’t know what we’re going to do with,” said Duff.

Some of the tapes they have found include Cindy Blodgett’s 47-point performance while leading the Lawrence of Fairfield girls to a fourth straight Eastern Maine Class A title with a win over Cony of Augusta in 1994; Maine’s triple-overtime, come-from-behind football victory over Connecticut in 1997, Maine hockey’s triple overtime victory over Michigan in the 1995 NCAA semifinals, and the Maine women’s upset win over Stanford in the first round of the 1999 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.

These are the games which will be included in the initial batch of classic offerings WZON will air later this summer.

“We may have to put it off a little because of conflicts with vacation weeks and having the people we need here to do it,” Duff explained. “We hope to start in early July or August, but we don’t even know if it’ll be a weekly thing or what.”

Duff does know he’d like to air each broadcast at least twice.

Some memorable games listeners might not hear for awhile include Bangor’s thrilling one-point victory over Deering in last winter’s Class A boys state championship basketball game. Games like that occurred a little too recently to fit the “classic broadcast” profile.

“We wanted to air games that are a little bit further back in people’s minds, plus we’d like to interview some of the people involved with those games and air some of that stuff along with the broadcasts,” Duff said. “We want to get their thoughts on the game and other things.”

Other exceptions – for different reasons – could be games like Bangor’s 1-0 win over Portland in the 1995 Class A state championship baseball game in which current pro player Matt Kinney threw a one-hit masterpiece.

“I don’t think we have the entire game on that broadcast because there was a another local team in action and we were doing coverage for both,” Duff said. “We have some other games that we only have partial tapes of, too, so we’re not sure what to do with those.”

In the meantime, they’ll keep on digging through the storage areas archives in an effort to unearth some more classics.