On the front of the 1966 program for the Eastern Maine Basketball Tournament, Class L and M, is written “For Sports Desk, Spike.” That would be late photographer Spike Webb.

Somewhere I have a copy of that program, too, because it was the first tournament game I ever attended at Bangor Auditorium on Wednesday, the evening of Feb. 23.

My dad and a friend and I made the trip from Abbot to Bangor to watch the Eastern Maine Finals in Class L, now known as Class B.

Piscataquis Community High School in Guilford wasn’t in the tournament that year, so we would watch the Class L finals between the Orono Red Riots and the Ellsworth Eagles.

I rooted for Ellsworth, I’m guessing because PCHS regularly played Orono and I wouldn’t have been in the habit of rooting for the Riots.

Of course, I couldn’t know then that from 1969 to 1973, Orono’s Peter Gavett would be playing for my University of Maine Black Bears.

Nor could I guess that Orono’s coach Bob Cimbollek would go on to coach at John Bapst, where my children would attend school and I would go to lots and lots of basketball games – not only those in the auditorium, but a good number in “the gym” at Bapst.

Visiting Bangor Auditorium for the first time was only slightly less overwhelming than my first trip some years later to Boston Garden for a Celtics game – the real Boston Garden, not FleetCenter.

I’ve since seen The Monkees, Roger Whittaker, Stephen King’s Rock Bottom Remainders, and even Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young at the auditorium. I’ve covered RV shows and math tournaments there.

But basketball, of course, was the be-all and end-all. We had such a good time at the tournament, and got so thoroughly excited about the whole deal, that my dad went out and bought a portable second TV just to make sure we could always watch basketball when the civilians in the family mutinied and insisted in watching something else.

Furthermore, I learned how to calculate the Heal point system -proof positive of devotion to high school hoops.

The next season, I even signed on as manager for the girls teams at PCHS. The girls played their games in the afternoon, with rarely more than a couple dozen fans in attendance.

There were six girls on the court per team – two stationary forwards, two stationary guards, and two rovers who could go full-court. A player could dribble just three bounces before passing.

If someone had told me that one day girls would again play real basketball, and that a girl from Clinton named Blodgett would be a star, of course I wouldn’t have believed it.

College basketball is pretty good. I like watching the UMaine teams.

The pros, most of them, break my heart. Run and gun and break every rule in the book – egregious traveling, double-dribbling, palming the ball, grabbing and crashing and fouling to the point I’m sure someone is going to be arrested for assault.

Real basketball is played by high school kids, boys and girls both.

Here at 491 Main St., you can tell when the tournament is in session, even if you don’t notice harried sportswriters running in and out of the newsroom.

If you’ve been following high school basketball since the ’60s, or before, you’re tuned in to the vibrations from the auditorium across the way.

Real fans have their own little piece of the old floor, dismantled when the new one was installed a few years ago. The souvenirs are available for $9.95 from the Civic Center office, each “with its own certificate of authenticity,” as Bass Park Director Mike Dyer likes to say.

Do I have one? Of course.

Good luck to all the teams in the tournament.