The game wasn’t on – at least not the right one – for several hundred people who plopped themselves down in their favorite chair with the remote, munchies and beverages at arm’s length.

Everything was set, until the remote clicked to the channel they were expecting to see the Western Maine Class A basketball finals on. But instead of action live from the Cumberland County Civic Center, they saw the Eastern Maine finals from the Bangor Auditorium.

The problem, according to Gil Maxwell, senior vice-president of technology and operations at Maine Public Broadcasting Service (Maine PBS), pretty much came down to geography: that of the teams in both region’s finals and that of the stations airing the games.

The folks at Maine Public Broadcasting realized they would be facing hurdles in Class A coverage that they hadn’t experienced in Class B, C, and D tournament coverage shortly after the semifinals concluded.

In the east, the Nokomis High School girls of Newport played Cony of Augusta and the Bangor boys took on Brunswick. In the west, it was upstart Lewiston facing top seed McCauley of Portland and the Cheverus boys of Portland vs. Edward Little of Auburn.

“We have Augusta’s WCBB (Channel 10), which serves Augusta, Lewiston-Auburn, Brunswick and North Portland and which we originally put the west games on,” said Maxwell. “Then we realized WCBB was right in the middle and was hugging the line for both places. Either way we went, we were in trouble.

“If we put East games on, we had Lewiston-Auburn and North Portland folks who would have been upset. If we put the west games on, then the Augusta and Brunswick people wouldn’t have liked it.”

Maxwell and other Maine PBS officials then scrambled to rectify the problem. They opted to carry the east games on Augusta’s WCBB and the west on Biddeford’s WMEA (Ch. 26), their only true southern/western Maine station, which covers an area from Kittery to South Portland. Then Maine PBS started talking to officials at the Adelphia and Time Warner cable companies in Southern Maine

“Time Warner has towns from Portland down to the Kittery border, so we struck a deal with them that when we put the east games on our transmitter, we were giving them the west games also, to put over the feed on the channel we’re normally on,” Maxwell said.

Things worked out well, but Maxwell said such was not the case with Adelphia.

“Now with Adelphia, we were trying to do the same thing,” he said. “We gave them equipment to receive the west games and put both on, but there must have been a mix-up.”

Instead of Adelphia customers getting the East games on WCBB’s regular location on the cable channel lineup and the West games on the local cable access channel, the East games wound up on both channels.

“Somebody told me we had about 200 calls from people who wanted the other game and couldn’t get it, but they weren’t all from the Lewiston-Auburn area,” Maxwell said. “Some were from Bangor who wanted to see the west games.”

Maxwell said it was a tough lesson learned, but pointed out that this was the first time Western Maine finals were ever on live television, and subscribers who get Adelphia’s digital cable service were able to see both regions’ finals on separate channels.

There’s good news for next year too. Coverage should be less difficult for Maine PBS, should it sign on to do Class A tourney coverage again, as both Lewiston and Edward Little are moving from the Western to Eastern Maine ranks.

All five Maine PBS stations (Augusta, Biddeford, Orono, Calais and Presque Isle) will air Saturday’s Class A state final games live at 3 and 7 p.m.

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