The curious case of the double tickets

If you've gone to any decent number of sporting events, you've probably had this conversation at least once:

"You're in our seats."
"No we're not. These are our seats."
"No ... this is ..." followed by the section, seat and row.
"OK, let me check ..." 

Mrs. Last Honest and I had one of these conversations today at Gampel Pavilion before the UConn-Notre Dame women's basketball game today (Notre Dame 73, UConn 72 ...you don't need a three-pointer Kaleena! ... we should all want to be Kelly Faris when we grow up), and there was no reason to believe it wasn't going to end up like 99.99 percent of these conversations do.

One of us was going to realize we had the wrong row, section or seat -- like about 10 minutes later in our section because someone misread a G for a Q -- and there would be a "sorry about that," a slightly embarrassed smile and everyone would end up where they belonged.

Except that didn't happen. We both had the exact same seats.

Mrs. Last Honest bought me the tickets for Christmas on StubHub. (What would have made this whole exercise even crazier is if I had bought her tickets to the same game for Christmas, which I was contemplating.) The other husband in this little adventure got them in his stocking for Christmas from his daughter. He didn't know how she had gotten them, but given they were identical to ours except ours were in color and his were in black and white (which actually is important later), I knew she had gotten them the same way.

Mrs. Last Honest and I got to the game first, so when I was chatting with the guy who would soon become my new best friend for the next little while, he said that when they scanned his tickets, they told him those seats had already been scanned, but when he went to the box office to inquire what was going on, they let him in anyway.

Since lap-sitting was clearly out of the question, the two of us set off to solve the problem, first enlisting help of arena staff, who sent us to a manager. The manager was convinced he had the solution ... that the black-and-white tickets clearly had to be a photocopy. Yup, aside from the complete lack of logic of such a conspiracy on our parts, there apparently was no consideration given to the possibility of us having a color printer and them having one that only printed in black and white.

So it was off to the box office we went, where ... they were utterly convinced his tickets were a photocopy.

Seriously.

I'm sure for the outside observer, there would have been considerable comedic value in watching us repeatedly (as in we had to do it more than once) tell the people in the box office that we had not met until just a few minutes ago. Fortunately, we got through to them (and I don't mean to portray all the Gampel staff as dunces ... they were actually very friendly throughout), and they found another couple tickets for our friends a few rows in front of us, so except for the result of the game, everyone lived happily ever after.

Well, except for maybe one person ...

Remember a few paragraphs back when I mentioned that, other than the color, the two sets of tickets were identical? That even extends to a name and account number on the printed ticket, so we have a pretty decent idea of who sold the same tickets twice. Now, it may have been an honest mistake -- that'll be up to UConn and StubHub to find out after we inform them -- but if two season tickets at Gampel are suddenly available, you'll know why.

If you think her face is pretty, check out her jumper

Over on ESPN's website, Scoop Jackson writes about Skylar Diggins of Notre Dame, in particular about how, as he puts it, she's one of those people who "defies the sentence that condemns the rest of us. Every now and then, someone shows up with sovereign skills and supreme attractiveness, and it's unfair."

"The hard thing about beauty is that it can't be ignored," Jackson writes. "Especially when it's so hard to ignore that it obscures something deeper, something that in this case is the attempt to out-ball damn near every yet-to-turn-pro female basketball player in the world.
Beauty, in Skylar Diggins' case, should come secondary. I said should ."

While I'm not so naive as to think that Diggins' looks don't get her extra attention (and some of those 131,000-plus Twitter followers), I'm going to guess that she's not the only attractive woman on the Notre Dame campus. I've never been there, but I feel fairly comfortable going out on that limb.

But it's because of basketball that Scoop Jackson, I and basketball fans know who she is.

Scoop gets it.

"Skylar Diggins will tell you that, for her, it's ball above all. It's on us to look past her beauty to see that."

Indeed it is. Can we?