Early Days: The Gun That Never Went Off
Ever wonder why a basketball hoop is shaped like a cone? When 30-year-old James Naismith (pictured) invented the game in 1891 while a phys ed instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts, he used a cone-shaped peach basket to serve as a well, yeah, a basket.
The beautiful game had its own memorable early days in the historic roots of Conval Nation. In the 1931 Class B state tournament semi-finals at UNH, Peterborough High and Lebanon were locked in a tense, down-to-the-wire battle that went to two overtimes. The Transcript noted, “The Peterborough crowd was gasping for breath at the finish, and that truth compels the assertion that the majority thought the Peterborough cause was lost when Lebanon put in two baskets to tie up the contest in the last 45 seconds of play. But Phil Cutter pulled the chestnuts from the fire in the second overtime period.”
Back then, there was no modern electronic scoreboard with a built-in horn to signal the end of the game, so in those days, the timer at the scorer’s table had to fire a gun! As the clock wound down to zero and the crowd in a frenzy—silence. For some reason, the timer’s gun refused to go off when time was up. Holy cow!
“The Peterborough crowd, noting [the timer’s] vain struggle to make the gun fire, yelled and signaled to referee Rogers that the game was over.”
Good thing, because Peterborough held on for a 17-15 victory that propelled them to a 28-14 win in the finals over Lincoln—the second of three consecutive state championships and one of five won by PHS before it morphed into Conval High in 1970.
