IS THIS GAME OVER???

[walter]

Sad to say...I was actually involved in a similar situation. Season before last working a semi-final of a Christmas Tournament. Three man crew. I was U1. Very veteran, very, very good official was R and new varsity official was U2. Three books and timer at the table (home team, visiting team, and tournament official book and tournament timer). After a timeout at approx. 2:30 left in fourth quarter in a tight see-saw game, R checks the books and all three have same totals for timeouts, points, fouls and possession info. Time expires in the fourth quarter with score on the board A-68, B-66. We leave the floor and are in the dressing room when the tournament director comes in and says there's a problem. He says it seems that both team books have score 66-66 while tournament book has score 68-66 for team A. He has all three books with him and says that the teams are still on the floor. The R decides to check the scoring in the fourth quarter because at the time out in the fourth quarter he had asked all scorers if they matched and all said yes. We could also see that the books matched at half and at the end of the third. As we're checking we see a spot where the tournament scorer recorded a two point goal in the running score while none of the others had anything. The rest of the running score matched in all books. To be safe we then checked each individual players scoring in the fourth quarter and everything in all three books matched. We then added the goals and free throws for each team for the game and they all matched and added up to 66-66 in all three books. R states that he wants us to go back out as a crew and talk to the timer and tournament scorer. We put whatever gear we had off back on and walked back out on the floor. The scorer tells us she thought she missed a basket in the fourth quarter and marked it in her book and told the timer to put the goal on the board. Remarkably no one noticed this as the action was pretty much non-stop. The timer confirms being told about a "missed" score in the fourth quarter. The R then calls both coaches together along with the tournament director and explains the situation (i.e. error with the official book and we're going to play overtime). Team A coach disagrees and we have to go through the process of explaining how we determined a mistake had been made. He then brings up the fact that we left the floor, the game is over. At that point the tournament director told him that overtime would be played. After conferring with his own scorer that a tie existed, he relented and after a long and embarrassing delay we played on. Team A went on to win by 6 in OT. Afterwards we were asking if there was ever a time we could have checked out the books again. The answer was no unless we did it during foul shots down the stretch because after that time out with about 2:30 left to play there was never another timeout taken. Our assignor and the ADs and the tournament staff thanked us for doing "the right thing" but it sure was embarrassing. We never once really considered calling the game and saying there was nothing we could do by rule. That certainly didn't seem right especially once we confirmed there was a mistake. We weren't redlined from the tournament so someone must have approved of our actions.