Tourney time is here, and now we go our separate ways.

For many, it will be business as usual, the annual pilgrimage to the Bangor Auditorium to watch the small-town teams of northern, eastern and central Maine make basketball memories that will be conversation topics for generations to come.

But for others, this is a time of considerable change, as a new era of Eastern Maine Class A postseason play begins this afternoon when that tournament moves up two weeks on the calendar and heads 70 miles south to the Augusta Civic Center.

For some Eastern Maine basketball fans, suddenly there are choices to be made. Bangor or Augusta? Class A or Classes B, C and D?

“There certainly is a portion of the fan base, particularly at the Bangor site, that would go to multiple games whether they involve particular teams of interest or not,” said Dick Durost, executive director of the tournament-sanctioning Maine Principals’ Association. “Some will have to make decisions on whether to go to the B, C and D tournament or to the A tournament. I expect most of those fans will likely stay with the B, C and D, and if there is an affinity for a particular Class A school, then they’ll go to Augusta.

“In other parts of the state, we haven’t seen the same number of fans that would show up for the entire tournament.”

One prime goal of moving the Eastern A tourney from Bangor to Augusta, as well as the corresponding shift of the Western B tourney from Augusta to the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, is to make those regionals more accessible to fans from the majority of schools in those divisions. Most of the Western B schools are from Portland south, while most of the Eastern A teams now reside south of Augusta.

Because of that geographic fact of life, the Eastern A tournament at Bangor took a considerable hit at the box office in recent years, down from 19,564 in total attendance in 2003 to 13,010 in 2004 to 12,153 last winter. In fact, there was little difference last year among Eastern Maine tournament attendance totals in any of the four classes.

Durost and others are hopeful the move of Eastern A to Augusta will draw increased attendance from the more southern and western locales in the region such as Brunswick, Morse of Bath, Oxford Hills of South Paris and Mt. Blue of Farmington. But because the regional also has been moved up two weeks there won’t be a simple attendance comparison to be made.

“We have the numbers from the past,” Durost said. “For many years, the Class A tournament was up in the 17,000 to 19,000 range, but in the last couple of years it’s been down in the 12,000 to 13,000 range. When this year’s tournament is over, we’ll have those numbers to compare and we’ll get a feel for it, but we’ll certainly need two or three years before we’ll have a more concrete comparison.”

Whether the changes achieve the desired results remain to be seen, and the current venues and dates seemed settled for the next five years – the length of the current contract between the MPA and the Bangor, Augusta and Portland sites.

But the geographic switch seems based in logic, and it says here that attendance for the Eastern A tournament – and probably the Western Bs in Portland – will experience a fairly robust increase.

I know I’ll be there.

Ernie Clark may be reached at 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or eclark@bangordailynews.net