Yeah, this is probably the defining story about Americans and cricket. From a Radio Times interview with Gwyneth Paltrow (who is married to Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin):

“I try to understand cricket, really, I try and I try,” she smiles. “Chris is a big fan and one day, I was like, ‘Right, I’m going to get into it,’ and I sat down and I was watching. And watching. And I carried on watching and then I said to him, ‘Look, I am enjoying the game, but is anything ever going to happen?’

And he said, ‘Is anything going to happen? These are the highlights!’”

I’d like to be among the first to congratulate the following high schools: Mankato Loyola, Long Prairie-Grey Eagle, Albany, Maple Grove, and Chanhassen. I’d like to really congratulate the following: Sauk Centre, Annandale, and Cloquet.

The first list is the list of all of the #6 seeds that won in the first round of the high school football playoffs on Tuesday night. The second list is all of the #7 seeds that pulled off an upset.

By my count, there were 172 games in the first round of the section playoffs on Tuesday night. 151 of these were won by the higher-seeded team. Let’s break this down by seed:

#1 seeds: 32-0
#2 seeds: 41-3
#3 seeds: 43-5
#4 seeds: 35-13

31 of the 48 sections will match up #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3 in the second round. Only three sections – 2A, 6AA, and 6AAA  – had more than one upset. Class 4A didn’t have a single upset in the entire first round.

At some point, I feel like we need to ask ourselves – do we really need to have eight teams make the playoffs in every section? Seems like we could get rid of the first round and its weird Tuesday game without losing too much from the prep football experience, with the obvious apologies to the schools listed above. And it might save a few teams from a Tuesday beating – like my school, Ortonville, which got beat 79-14 by Dawson-Boyd last night.

Here’s the list of all 21 upsets in the state:

6-9MAN: #5 Hillcrest Lutheran 20, #4 Norman County East 14
7-9MAN: #5 Mountain Iron-Buhl 31, #4 Ely 12
2A: #5 Minnesota Valley Lutheran 20, #4 Sleepy Eye 16
2A: #6 Mankato Loyola 28, #3 Lake Crystal-Wellcome 13
3A: #5 Springfield 21, #4 Martin County Werst 20
4A: #5 BBE 26, #4 Royalton 13
8A: #5 Northern Freeze 48, #4 Red Lake 20
5AA: #5 Benson 30, #4 Morris 14
6AA: #5 Holdingford 28, #4 Upsala/Swanville 0
6AA: #6 LP-GE 15, #3 Breckenridge 14
6AA: #7 Sauk Centre 56, #2 Osakis 29
1AAA: #5 Stewartville 10, #4 Byron 7
5AAA: #5 Rockford 35, #4 Blake 13
6AAA: #6 Albany 26, #3 St. Cloud Cathedral 18
6AAA: #7 Annandale 21, #2 New London-Spicer 20
7AAA: #7 Cloquet 21, #2 Pine City 14
8AAA: #5 Park Rapids 13, #4 EGF 10
1AAAAA: #5 Lakeville South 35, #4 Rochester Mayo 7
4AAAAA: #5 East Ridge 33, #4 Hastings 14
5AAAAA: #6 Maple Grove 36, #3 St. Michael-Albertville 0
6AAAAA: #6 Chanhassen 27, #3 Shakopee 26

A couple of weeks ago, I received a breathless text and photo from my Dad: “TAJ SHOWED UP THIS MORNING TO SURPRISE A GIRL SHE CORRESPONDED WITH. Remarkable.” He was referring, of course, to center Taj McWilliams-Franklin, fresh off winning a WNBA Championship with the Minnesota Lynx. And she’d driven all the way to Ortonville just to visit a high school sophomore she’d been writing back and forth with. No cameras. No reporters. No fanfare or publicity – just a visit.

I am not a very good reporter, but even I knew that this is one of those stories that doesn’t need much work to become really good. And so I forwarded the details I had on to my friend Michael Rand. Meanwhile, Dad was writing a very nice letter to the Lynx about the visit. The team was as surprised as anyone – they didn’t know any more about McWilliams-Franklin’s plan than anyone else.

Eventually, Rand tracked down the letter, and published it on RandBall. If you missed it before, go read it now. And not just because my dad wrote it – because it’s a really good story, and you’re going to feel good about the Lynx and about McWilliams-Franklin and what a great thing she did for no reason at all other than because she’s awesome.

The Rangers just went up 3-2 in the World Series. Nick Punto was 0-3 with a walk and two strikeouts. He was up three times with runners in scoring position and he drove no runs home. I recapped the game for Twinkie Town, but really, it just turned into a mini-essay on Punto.

NSC Minnesota Stars 3:1 Fort Lauderdale Strikers
Minnesota: Hlavaty 3, Mulholland 53, Rodriguez 72
Fort Lauderdale: Davis (og) 52′
Highlights: Via YouTube

A few quick thoughts from last night’s first leg of the NASL finals:

• You couldn’t ask for a nicer night for a game, at least in Minnesota in late October, and the crowds came out. The Twins bought 500 tickets for the game, the Wild and Vikings bought 500 more, and so a thousand fans walked through the gates for free, courtesy of the area’s biggest teams. According to the Stars ticket office, they think about two-thirds of these fans were attending their very first Stars game. If so, they really should be back next season, because they got a heck of a game to watch.
• In a related story: I’ve never seen such a big turnout from the Dark Clouds, the fan group that supports the Stars. Three sections of the bleachers opposite the main stands were full of folks jumping up and down and waving flags and singing songs. The beer tent was three rows deep, too. It was a playoff atmosphere.
• I sat in the reserved stands on the halfway line, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had better seats for a pro sporting event. (Why was I in the reserved section? It’s the only one with chairbacks, and I like to lean back. And though I love the atmosphere the Dark Clouds provide, I feel weird standing amongst them by myself. Gopher hockey fans have long complained of the energy-less “corpies” in the good seats at Mariucci Arena; I guess I’m a soccer “corpie.” In my defense, I didn’t spend all game chatting to my neighbor, and I yelled abuse at several Strikers players.)
• Neil Hlavaty‘s free kick in the third minute was wonderful – low, powerful, around the wall and inside the far post. Just unsaveable. Luke Mulholland’s goal in the second half was just as good – a blast against the grain that the keeper had no chance of stopping. Lucas Rodriguez scored the third, as four Strikers defenders stood still while Rodriguez scored. As for the own goal by Justin Davis, you have to admire the sheer failure of it – no pressure, a ball that would have gone out for a goal kick, and a redirection via the chest right between the keeper and the post. Everything had to go wrong, and it did.
• Take my biased opinion for what it’s worth, but Fort Lauderdale was absolutely awful. They created nothing. Their defenders did convincing imitations of traffic cones. I can’t remember if they even played any midfielders. Hlavaty and Andrei Gotsmanov kept receiving the ball in midfield, turning around, and realizing that they could run for thirty yards without being bothered. 3-0 or 4-0 would have been a more deserved scoreline.
• On the other side, the Stars really controlled all but about twenty minutes of the game. For the middle part of the second half, they seemed to temporarily forget they were allowed to pass the ball from defense to midfield; every time a defender got the ball, he’d take two touches, look up, and boot it long at the lonely figure of Brian Cvilikas, who’d then get to try to win a header against three Strikers defenders.
• For Man of the Match – Mulholland was tireless and scored a cracker of a goal, and Hlavaty was imperious in midfield. But my pick is central defender Cristiano Dias, who didn’t put a foot wrong all night. He was, in my view, absolutely flawless.

The second leg of the match is next Saturday, 6:30 pm in Fort Lauderdale. The Stars managed just two draws in four regular-season matches against the Strikers, so I can’t believe Fort Lauderdale will come out and be as bad as they were last night. But if they are – then the NASL trophy is coming to Minnesota.

*This is a perfect edition of the weekend links, by which I mean that it’s pretty much what I strive for – a plug for soccer at the top, two really good long reads from out-of-the-way sources, the best Twins post of the week, a hockey joke, and a few references to cricket. If you don’t like this, you won’t ever like the weekend links. As always, this post appeared first at RandBall, your internet destination for light rail-themed pub crawls.   *

Just a reminder, for those of you who were thinking “Boy, it’s an awfully nice day today – I wish there was some kind of sporting event I could attend tonight”: your local pro soccer team, the NSC Minnesota Stars, play the first leg of the NASL Championship match tonight at 7:30 pm. The game’s at the National Sports Center in Blaine. I’ll be there. It’ll be fun. There will be free beer and free tacos.

On with the links:

*We start this week with Mark Kelly’s long profile of Alabama radio host Paul Finebaum. It’s a fascinating read for those of us in Big Ten country and especially here in Minnesota, who maybe don’t quite understand just how important football is in the South.

*Tony Johns at Pop Off Valve, an IndyCar blog, had to write the post that nobody wants to write following the tragic death of Dan Wheldon last weekend in Las Vegas. It’s a touching eulogy for a guy who didn’t deserve to be gone, not now, not this early.

*Parker Hageman wonders if there’s any hope for Tsuyoshi Nishioka. Apparently, our best hope is that offensively Nishioka may someday approach Alexi Casilla. Given that defensively, Nishioka’s best hope is for the other team to make a “no hitting the ball to shortstop” rule, I think you’ll join me in hoping that Nishioka spends the next two years anywhere but on the Twins’ major-league roster.

*Down Goes Brown has written a hockey fan’s guide to the World Series. NOTE: This post will only be funny to you if you are a hockey fan, so those of you that aren’t will want to skip this one.

*And finally: Here’s a picture of Jay Cutler playing cricket. I have been trying and trying to think of a joke to go with this picture. I can’t decide between “Moments later, Cutler became the first cricket player in history to be sacked five times in a match,” or “Just out of frame is bowler Donovan McNabb, who’s finally found a sport at which he can utilize his skill at throwing the ball into the ground.” Also, if you want video of Charles Tillman swinging like a girl, here you go.

That’ll do it for me. I’m planning to go sit outside today and watch football – both the American kind, and the “pretentious people that call soccer ‘football’ even though they are American” kind. Enjoy the weekend. It could be our last really nice one until about May.

This week at Twinkie Town, I take a research-free look at the St. Louis – Texas World Series. I haven’t seen the Cardinals play, and I can’t remember much about the Rangers except for the night they put up a million runs against the Twins this summer and Michael Cuddyer pitched the ninth inning.

With this in mind, here’s my uninformed guide to this year’s Fall Classic.

A note on SB Nation stuff: there used to be a little feed in the sidebar that showed all of my SB Nation posts. That is now broken, though I’m not sure why. Anyway, all this means is that I’ll have to be better about posting stuff here in the main area. Which would be fine, except I’m posting this six days late (though the timestamp will show otherwise.)

*Bit late on getting these posted. They appeared first at RandBall, your home for thinly-disguised anti-technology rants… *

I’ve posted a lot of anti-Vikings stadium arguments here, over the years, but I’d like to start off this week by posting the first good pro-stadium argument I’ve heard. It comes to us from fellow RandBaller Clarence Swamptown: “There are a number of goverment services I pay for and use. There are many more that I happily pay for but will never use in my lifetime. There is also a TON of waste. I’ve worked for nearly every level of government possible – from the smallest township to the unwieldy feds. Please trust me when I tell you that there is a ton of waste. I’m not smart enough to know how to change that. And I don’t have any definitive idea if the new Vikings’ stadium would be an economic stimulus or a billionaire handout. Both sides have a case. But I do know that a new Vikings’ stadium is something I would use, either directly or indirectly. Even if it is waste, at least it’s some waste that a rube like me can enjoy. Yeah, it’s selfish. So sue me. In conclusion, Dany Heatley is a [horrible insult redacted].” Well, you can’t say fairer than that.

On with the links:

*Christian Peterson at the VikesCentric blog goes inside the numbers – or, at least, the player grades – and finds out that not only is Phil Loadholt not useless, he’s actually been one of the best run-blockers in the NFL so far this year. (About pass blocking, we will say no more.)

*Loved this story from SB Nation about Frank Matrisciano, who’s a trainer at the University of Memphis but is better known as Hell’s Trainer. Former Stanford basketball player Dan Grunfeld, who trained with Matrisciano in college, tells his story.

*Spencer Hall explains why both Brett Favre and Tim Tebow are magnets for stupid. Key quote: “No player in the history of the NFL attracted as much pure, uncut stupid as Brett Favre, a figure whose appeal for stupid people exceeded all previous attractors.”

*Matt Birk – you remember Matt Birk, don’t you? – got fined $5,000 for, of all things, not wearing a microphone. Birk makes a bunch of money and I’m sure nobody feels bad for him, but let’s take a step back here: Holy crap, Matt Birk got fined a half-year of mortgage payments for not wearing a microphone even though HE IS A CENTER. Sometimes, the NFL is really, really confusing.

*And finally: let’s all extend our hearty congratulations to the city of Vancouver. Well done, Canucks fans!

That’s enough for this week. Enjoy your Saturday, which may actually feel like October this week, rather than mid-July. If your house is anything like mind, you’ve got about two feet of leaves in the backyard that blew off the trees last week without even turning colors, so you might want to get after those.

There’s not much Twins news to cover these days. All of the non-playoff teams pretty much lay low until the World Series is over, and the Twins are as non-playoff as a team can get.

With this in mind, today’s Twinkie Town post is entirely fictional. And Nick Punto is back, which is always fun; I have missed the chance to make Nick Punto jokes.

Checked in on the ESPN.com home page on Sunday afternoon, with the NFL in full swing for the day. As you might expect, the main above-the-fold area of the page was all NFL scores and the top three stories on the right sidebar were NFL-related. This is to be expected; the NFL is the biggest thing going in American sports and it’s be foolish of ESPN to not throw as many resources as it can at the sport. The page is also chock full of the baseball playoffs and of college football, and since those two compete for #2 in a lot of different ways, that’s no surprise either.

That said, the NHL just began over the weekend, too. With the NBA possibly locked out for the year, the NHL is presumably the biggest thing going for a winter sport, and I expected to find something hockey-related to read.

• The following sports were covered in the “Headlines” sidebar, besides the big three mentioned above: NASCAR, tennis (the Japan Open), golf (the Korea Open), Formula One
• The following sports were covered in the main story rotation, beneath the above-the-fold main section, besides the big three: NASCAR
• The following sports were covered in a main, page-wide section, slightly below the fold (again, besides the big three): Ultimate fighting, high school football, skateboarding
• The following sports appeared in the “Must Read” headlines section, near the bottom of the page: soccer, women’s basketball, men’s college basketball, women’s college basketball, rugby.

And finally… in that Must Read section, buried between soccer and the WNBA Finals… a hockey story. About Sidney Crosby. Who’s out with concussion symptoms and has been for most of the year.

Thanks to the ESPN.com home page, I can tell you won a third-tier tennis tournament and an Asian Tour golf event. I can tell you who clinched the Formula One world title and whether England won or lost at the Rugby World Cup. I know the name of one of skateboarding’s up-and-coming stars, how the Stanford Cardinal women’s basketball team is shaping up for the year, and who won the latest UFC championship fight.

I cannot, however, say definitively whether the NHL regular season has begun or not.