Last fall, Drew Bledsoe was New England’s starting quarterback and Bangor sports radio station WZON was the local Patriots football affiliate.

This fall, Bledsoe will be taking snaps from center for the Buffalo Bills and fans of the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots will have to tune in a new station to catch all the action.

After five years on the Sports Zone, the Pats have been intercepted by WFZX (101.7 FM) of Searsport and WNSX (97.7 FM) of Bar Harbor. The Clear Channel Worldwide network stations were notified by the Patriots that they had secured rights to Patriots preseason and regular season games for the 2002-2003 season.

“We’re thrilled. Timing is everything, I guess,” said WFZX/WNSX general manager Keryn Smith, referring to the Pats’ status as defending NFL champions. “It’s a one-year contract because that’s their standard length of contract.

“If we’d had the option to take a long-term deal, we would have. This is something we look at as a long-term relationship. It’s another very well-established franchise that’s of significant interest to a lot of people and that’s what we want to be associated with.”

Although the official contract is still awaiting signatures, Smith said he believes his classic rock stations have right of first refusal, which means they’ll have first dibs each contract year on whether to renew their contract.

So why did WZON opt out?

“The answer is they wanted clearance on two to three hours of pregame coverage plus the game and postgame,” said WZON program director Dale Duff. “It amounted to about eight hours of programming commitments in one day and we can’t do that. I mean, we just can’t.”

Duff explained that his station’s pre-existing commitments to the Boston Red Sox and University of Maine sports made it impossible to guarantee the Patriots full clearance of all their broadcasts.

“Their big issue was wanting full clearance of pregame and postgame shows in addition to game coverage because of advertiser commitments they’d made,” said Smith. “We not only agreed to that, we presented them a package that gave them complete coverage from Camden to Waterville.”

Actually, the combined

WFZX-WNSX coverage area blankets an area from the Canadian border down through Calais and Camden and on south to the Waterville-Augusta area. It goes as far north as Lincoln, according to Smith, and fully covers the Bangor market as well.

“We’ve talked about this from the beginning, but we’ve been actively working on this for about a year and a half,” Smith said. “When we first talked about it and they weren’t available, we could have done something like maybe throwing the Giants on.

“In the short run, maybe that makes sense, but in the long run, if we’d bailed and then gone with the Patriots, we might have looked like asses, especially to Giants fans who got used to having their games on. So we looked at it with more of a long view.”

Smith didn’t divulge how much the stations are paying for Patriots radio rights, but fees can range anywhere from a thousand dollars in a small market like Dexter to a few thousand dollars in a market like Bangor.

“It’s worth it to us because now anybody who wants to listen to the Patriots will know where they’re on,” Smith said. “You don’t have to wander around on the dial or tune in to the Internet or whatever.”

As for WZON, it’s not as if they’re in the same situation as NBC when the national television network lost rights to AFC football. The all-sports station still has rights to NFL Sunday night and Monday night games as well as all playoff games.

“Plus we still have Maine games on Saturday and high school games Friday and Saturday,” Duff said.

Moose lottery live

Wednesday’s annual lottery for Maine moose hunting permits will be covered pick-by-pick on the Internet this year.

The lottery has traditionally been aired by Dover-Foxcroft radio station WDME (103.1 FM), but WDME is going to air Foxcroft Academy’s Eastern Maine Class B championship baseball game Wednesday night (7 p.m.) instead.

So the broadcast was moved to fellow Zone Corporation network member WZON’s Internet site at Zoneradio.com.

“We were going to do it anyway, but as it turns out, with Foxcroft playing that night, we moved it to the ‘I,'” said Duff. “I believe it’s a first-time thing where it’s essentially being broadcast worldwide.”

WDME morning show host Mark Young will host the 41/2-hour broadcast, which starts at 5:30 p.m.

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