He also informed me of the things he had been hearing on the radio that day: "It's 25 today in Duluth, down 20 degrees from yesterday. That must be become that slime Nick Wurf rolled into town."

Once the game started, I thought I had finally feded into the background of the day's events.

Then the electronic scoreboard began to flash messages about me.

The trouble that I had recognized in my room, by myself, had now manifested itself, times 5637. The crowd began to chant: "Who's Nick Wurf?"

You get a sense of how repulsive your own name is when enough Minnesota wolves start howling it.

Ten thousand eyes turned to the press box and I recoiled into the background, praying for anonymity from the very spotlight, into whose glare I had gratefully jumped earlier that day.

After the game--a 4-2 UMD victory--each member of the press was briefly detained by the crowd as he or she left the press box for an identity check.

For my part, being without an identity that I could subject to public scrutiny, I hid. Like a yellow-bellied piece of preppy slime, I stayed in the safety of the press box, until my would-be welcoming committee was escorted out of the arena by decorum-minded ushers.

I ventured back to the Holiday Inn, my Bates Motel, where a visit by a member of the Crimson team furthered my anxieties about the town--several players had been grabbed by little old women in the nearby Macdonald's and sternly informed that they had attended the symphony last night.

The next morning, after sleeping through a bunch of horrific nightmares, involving me, Duluth and an endless coal shaft, I read the first newspaper column about myself and what was termed "THE article."

That afternoon, while driving around the city, I got pulled over for speeding. Just another episode in the Dream Weekend.

I didn't care about the ticket, the size of the fine, the justice of the arrest or anything else for that matter as I sat, annoyed, waiting for the cop to walk up to my window and ask for my license and registration. The only thing I was thinking about was how long it would take him to recognize my name and the amount of flak he was going to give me when he did.

These particular gentlemen had apparently missed the entire controversy and he led to the police station (standard procedure for out-of-state drivers receiving Duluth violations) without even the slightest comment.