Patriots Notebook

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – Attending marquee events like Sunday afternoon’s AFC Championship game at Gillette Stadium usually means you have to have at least one of two things: money or connections.

Andy Galeati and Bill Perkins had a connection, so the ended up scoring some great seats. For the pair from Orono, it was Foxborough from Old Town by way of Indianapolis, Ind., and Chapel Hill, N.C.

Huh?

Thanks to mutual friends and maintaining contact over the years, Galeati and Perkins attended their first game at Gillette Stadium courtesy of tickets from Indianapolis Colts starting center Jeff Saturday.

“Jeff and I have a best friend in common. That’s how we became good friends. He called me and said he had some tickets to spare,” Galeati said. “He’s a real nice person and a generous, Christian man and I’ve always wanted to see him play. He always said any time I wanted tickets to come down, but I’ve never really had a chance until today.”

Galeati, who played defensive end at Orono High School and in prep school before playing professionally in Europe, first met Saturday when Saturday was starting center at the University of North Carolina in 1997. He went down to see best friend Nate Hobgood-Chittick, who played for the St. Louis Rams, play for the Tar Heels.

“I’ve known Nate since we were kids and we played football together in junior high,” said Galeati. “Nate and Jeff were roommates and teammates in college. I saw them play and we hung out for four or five days and stayed in touch.”

The 6-foot-2, 292-pound Saturday was the best man at Hobgood-Chittick’s wedding.

This isn’t the first time Galeati scored tickets to a premium football game. Hobgood-Chittick got him tickets for the 2000 Super Bowl, in which the Rams defeated Tennessee 23-16 after Mike Jones stopped Tennessee’s Kevin Dyson a yard short of a touchdown as time expired.

“I sat right next to Mike Jones’ dad. He was giving hugs to everybody when his son made the game-saving tackle,” he said.

This time around, Galeati and Perkins sat with Saturday’s wife Karen in the visiting team section. Sitting in the Colts section wasn’t a problem for Galeati. He’s not a Patriots fan.

“My favorite team is Miami. I’ll be a Colts fan today, though,” Galeati said. “We’re going to be in amongst Colts fans, so I’m going to be in a protective shield.”

The 29-year-old Perkins, however, is a Pats fan, for the last 20 years.

“I’m a good guy and if they can’t tell that, I guess I’ll just deal with it, but I’ll be cheering either way, and the way I look at it is I get to see a great guy play in a great game between two great teams,” Perkins said. “If the scoreboard reads the right way at the end, that’ll be even better.”

Both hope to invite Saturday up to spend some time in Maine.

“Jeff hasn’t come to Maine, but we’ve talked about it,” Galeati said. “Hopefully someday he can come up and we’ll take him four-wheeling in the woods, and I have a big enough four-wheeler to take him on it.”

Tailgate:: not just for pickups

When it comes to tailgating, these people are serious.

“I missed one preseason game this year because my wife gave birth to our second child. I haven’t missed any others,” said Bill Perkins of Bridgewater, Mass. “Tailgating is, I would say, is 50 percent of the game.”

The 32-year-old Perkins just happens to be Bangor-born Bill Perkins.

“I lived down the street from where the old Saint Mary’s church burned down. My mother used to work at the Shop ‘n Save on Union Street,” Perkins, 32 said. “I got to Portland fairly often and I still come to Bangor once a year for family reunions.”

Perkins is one of the core members of a group numbering 20 people who rotate 11 season tickets and attend every Pats home game.

“Frankie [Silva] is the captain and he keeps us organized,” said Perkins. “We meet at a restaurant and bring about three or four cars over. All three of them are red, but it just kind of happened that way.”

These guys have everything they need, prime parking spots close to the stadium entrance and everything from propane heaters to tarps to tent frames to grills to utensils and cutlery and food and drinks galore.

“When we first started coming here, Frankie was the first one to have a flag and then I was the first one to bring a fire pit,” said Perkins, one of 11 people all decked out in Patriots jerseys, shirts and face paint. We also have big home speakers to hear the music and everything and we change up the food menu each week. It’s a lot of fun. We try to be the first ones in parking lot and the last ones to leave.”

That usually means arriving at 9 a.m. when gates open. Sunday, they arrived at 9:30 a.m.

“You can’t get a parking space like this if you come late,” said Perkins, a season ticket holder for the last 11 years and an annual attendee of games for 20. “The parking guys always try to tell us to come down to the other end, but we just drive here and park.”

Pauline and Michael Domrad of Milbridge are relative tailgating newcomers as season ticket holders the last five years, but they know the drill.

“We may miss one or two games a year, but we come down for most of them and we don’t miss the playoff games, not even last week’s,” Pauline said. “People said I was nuts, but I said, ‘Wait a minute, you guys go snowmobiling, ice fishing and skiing in the extreme cold, so why am I any crazier than you?’ The only crazy part of it is leaving at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Since meeting friends from New Hampshire through tailgating, the 51/2-hour drive to Foxborough doesn’t always have to be straight through. Sometimes they stay overnight with those friend and then come down the next morning.

Since their two sons and one daughter have grown up, the Domrads have become more involved fans.

“We got on the waiting list for tickets when Bill Parcells was coach and got them when Pete Carroll was coach,” she explained. “We didn’t do as much with it when we had our kids. But now that they’re gone, we have this thing that we do together now.”

Damariscotta native Kyle O’Bryan, who now lives in Charlestown, Mass., also regularly attends games with a large group of friends.

“I’ve been coming here for three years with these guys,” said the Lincoln Academy and Bates College graduate who helped lead his high school basketball team to a Class B state title. “There’s usually about 15 of us or so. Everybody knows what to bring and it all works out really well.”

A defensive posture

It was apparent soon after entering the grounds at Gillette Stadium that nothing about Sunday’s game was average.

That certainly applied to security, which was as tight as the pass coverage exhibited by New England’s secondary on Peyton Manning’s receivers.

In addition to the usual contingent of stadium security personnel, 200 Apollo Security employees were brought in to supplement security along with state and local police officers.

Officers dressed in riot gear and packing automatic weapons as well as pistols were stationed at each main entrance. Fans were patted down before entering and all bags and cases brought in by media members were hand-searched. Security tags were attached after searches and identification tags – of which there were 20 different kinds issued to approximately 450 members of the media – had to be clearly displayed before access was granted to various parts of the stadium.

Two bomb-sniffing dogs were used to patrol stadium grounds and they were accompanied by bomb squad experts who carried equipment to defuse any explosives they might encounter.