Long before ESPN began advertising its ongoing 100 Most Memorable Moments of the past 25 years promotion, personnel at Bangor radio station WZON (620 AM) devised a way to mark the 10th anniversary of their all-sports station.

The Sports Zone began its top 10 most memorable broadcasts countdown this week with No. 10 being the 1997 Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race in which Canadian kayaker Robert Lang set the course record by shattering his previous mark by more than four minutes.

“Believe it or not, we actually thought of it before the whole ESPN 100 countdown thing,” said station program director and broadcaster Dale Duff. “We as a staff basically voted for our top 20 broadcasts, in order, and then tallied them up from there.”

Duff said eight staff members, including former afternoon host and current Maine hockey play-by-play man Dan Hannigan, each submitted a list of their top 20 broadcasts and each pick was assigned a point value (No. 1 was worth 20 and No. 20 was worth one). The final tallies determined the station’s top 10 picks and there were no ties to break.

“The first seven or eight are almost all on everyone’s list and of the 20 we had per person, there were 12 or 13 on just about everyone’s list,” Duff said. “It’s kind of neat how we got such a wide variety of sports in the final 10.”

There weren’t too many surprises in the WZON Most Memorable Broadcasting Moments Top 10. If anything, the agreement among staffers was surprising.

“There was a lot of agreement, but the fact the top 12 were almost all unanimous was a bit of a surprise and the top three were just about everyone’s top three, although in different order,” said Duff.

The final list is “top secret” but Duff did divulge that No. 9, which will be featured next week, is the Mark Rogers week in which the No. 1 draft pick of the Milwaukee Brewers pitched for Mount Ararat of Topsham in the Class A Eastern Maine and state title games.

Although Duff preferred to keep the rest of the list under wraps, the No. 1 pick shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone and it’s a good bet most Maine sports fans would be right if they guessed what it was.

Each top-10 installment, which runs about three minutes long and features highlights of the broadcast rather than the entire broadcast itself, debuts Monday on the station’s morning show and is repeated throughout each day.

“It’s just a way to kind of get people to realize that over the last 10 years, we’ve done a lot of sports from a lot of different places,” Duff said. “It’s kind of neat to see what our staff’s special memories are about various events we’ve done.”

Raising funds for Jimmy

WZON will air its ninth annual Jimmy Fund Radiothon and Auction on Monday from 7 a.m. to noon. Last year the station raised more than $6,000 for the official charity of the Boston Red Sox and the fund-raising arm of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which is trying to cure cancer in children and adults.

This year, some of the items WZON will auction off include a fungo bat autographed by Red Sox Hall of Fame member Johnny Pesky; balls signed by Kevin Millar, Trot Nixon, and Roger Clemens; a Red Sox ticket package that includes four tickets to a game in September and a trip to the radio booth to visit Sox announcers Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano; a Grady Little “bobblehead” doll; and a CD titled Hot Stove, Cool Music featuring cuts by Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein’s rock group Trauser as well as music by baseball columnist and ESPN contributor Peter Gammons, who does a cover of Chuck Berry’s song “Carol.” Both Epstein and Gammons have autographed the CD cover.

Andrew Neff can be reached at 990-8205, 1-800-310-8600 or at aneff@bangordailynews.net