After spending the first 12 years in this paid newspaper gig in sports, I was traded to news.

I went from “Toyland” to the “Real News Department” in the summer of 1996 and for months kept hearing about election night, my new colleagues making it sound worse than Route 22 rush-hour traffic.

I obviously knew about elections because I voted, but I had never worked one. In fact, sports departments were told to get done early on election night so “we would be out of the way” - news was going to be late and the pressroom didn’t want to deal with sports on deadline. Made me feel like I was on the JV team.

Elections are still important in newsrooms today. Before the pandemic and severe cuts were made in newsrooms, they were an even bigger deal: Think political tailgating.

The staff usually wandered in around 7 p.m. hungry and cranky. Reporters wrote some background copy and editors assigned stories to pages - with the wild card being any big upsets - and then we’d eat and wait. Pizza was the food of choice, with the boss making sure to get enough for dinner and end-of-the-night snack - at morning papers you usually wouldn’t get done until well after midnight

And there would always be homemade cookies.

But back to my first election.

Even though I was officially out of the sports department, I still helped on Fridays during football season. It kept me tethered to a part of the paper I felt passionate about ... and the editor couldn’t find anyone else gullible enough to work into the wee hours on a Friday night.

So in the fall of 1996 I had my first true journalistic taste of an election.

It was a lot of eating, a lot of waiting and then a mad rush over the last 2-3 hours to get the paper done without totally obliterating our deadline.

When we finished that night, the sentiment among my colleagues was, “Thank goodness we don’t have to do that again until the spring.”

My boss asked me, “So, what did you think of your first election?”

I looked him straight in the eye, munching on a chocolate chip cookie, and said, “Almost as crazy as a Friday night during football season, except we don’t get pizza and homemade cookies.”

Speaking of food, we still have three teams dishing out morsels of pigskin - actually footballs are made of cowhide leather or synthetic materials, but cowskin or synskin don’t sound as cool as pigskin.

Unbeatens Palmerton and Northwestern rolled in the opening round of the District 11 playoffs, while Marian Catholic advanced to the Class A title game against Minersville.

No. 1: Palmerton. We saw this coming Oct. 13 - a Palmerton-North Schuylkill rematch in the District 11 Class AAA playoffs. Four weeks ago, Palmerton won 48-24 but expect a much closer game this time. Winner gets the Northwestern-Notre Dame winner for the district title.

No. 2: Northwestern. Speaking of the Tigers, I am biting what’s left of my fingernails after election night on this one. Notre Dame can rack up points, but the Crusaders (8-3) also give up a lot. The two teams did not meet in the regular season. Stat of note: In Notre Dame’s 11 games this season, the winning team only scored less than 40 once - North Schuylkill beat ND 28-21.

No. 3: Marian.

No. 4: Pleasant Valley. An Eastern Conference title vaults the Bears up a few spots.

No. 5: Tamaqua.

No. 6: Jim Thorpe.

No. 7: Lehighton.

No. 8: Northern Lehigh.

No. 9: Panther Valley.