The Owner's Box After Dark, Ep. 61.

Highlights galore began from those two windows on the right of the KPHS press box.

As promised, I finally took the time to record what became the longest episode of The Owner's Box After Dark ... although you can breathe easily, Episode 61 is not just all me sitting in the studio and yammering at the camera.

I took the time to record snippets of video from some of the games I announced during the 2024-25 school season for North TV, Mansfield Cable Access and Foxboro Cable Access, as a way of paying tribute to the athletes I had the pleasure to cover -- and to remind me that as of today, there's just one more month left before I'll be doing my first football game of the new season.

That will be the King Philip Warriors' home opener on Friday, Sept. 5, against the Timberwolves of Walpole High. That game is scheduled for a 7 p.m. start at Macktaz Field, and I'll have more details about North TV's broadcast plans as soon as the schedule is firmed up in a few weeks.

You'll see and hear some of my best calls of the year, most of them from the fall and winter seasons. The voice was a little weak in the spring season and the highlights are a little on the pedestrian side because of a bronchial infection that hit me right at the end of the winter season. But I'm tanned, rested and ready to go for what will be my eighth season behind the local microphones.

When I started, I had no idea this episode would run as long as it did. It was well over an hour and a half at completion, and I didn't even get to add anything other than football, basketball, baseball and softball highlights. My first three attempts to upload it to YouTube resulted in some glitching toward the end, a few screen freezes, although the audio runs well throughout. 

I even revisited the finished product and trimmed more than five minutes out of it, hoping that would eliminate the glitching, but there's still a little of it at the end of the finished product. I think that's a good reminder to keep the episodes under an hour, as I believe I tested the capacities of my software to its limits.

Lesson learned -- although this episode still features great moments like Drew Laplante's 60-yard TD run for King Philip on the fourth offensive play of last year's Super Bowl against Catholic Memorial, and Maddy Steel's game winning three-point shot within the last second of Bishop Feehan's victory over Worcester South. There is also my usual array of vintage commercials and those supremely entertaining Japanese ads, and the introduction of "Lightning Round" topics at the end of the episode -- although this inaugural round moves more like a slow summer rain than a fast-moving thundershower. We'll work on that.

Anyway, it's free to watch, so who's complaining?