The Front Row with JASON ELLIOTT September 29, 2010

There is a good reason why I look forward to this time of the year.

Conference football begins in college, the NFL is starting to get into its schedule and the playoffs are starting in baseball.

And as much as I look forward to it, it's hard to get excited this time around.

WHILE TRAVELING home from work last Wednesday, I began to think of all the different things that had happened within the past week.

Still, just a few days after the Lakeland-Timberlake football game, I started to think it was the best high school game I'd ever seen.

If I've ever wanted to go look at some of my past articles - all I had to do was go into the Shoshone News-Press, where I worked for seven years as a sports writer.

I never got that chance this time.

On Thursday morning, I woke up to the news that the News-Press office was on fire.

Upon driving toward Kellogg, I began to think of some of those games - one moment of note was an 88-64 outburst in an 8-man football game between Mullan and St. Regis that didn't seem to have a moment when someone wasn't scoring a touchdown.

When I finally got to the area around the office, it was apparent that a lot of those archives may be long gone.

A blessing of sorts, was having my grandma save most of those articles from the years I worked in Kellogg.

As shocking as the fire was, it doesn't even compare to the news I received around the same date two years ago.

WHEN WATCHING my cousin Josh grow up throughout the years, I'd see him every once in a while when I was in Mullan.

I didn't know much of him as an athlete, but after talking to him just a couple weeks before the start of the football season, he told me that he wasn't going to play his senior year.

The first game went by - without him in the lineup, but he assured me that he was going to play by the end of the season.

A few weeks later, he had three catches for 198 yards and three touchdowns for the Mullan Tigers in a win over then-Post Falls Christian Academy.

Later that season, Josh was named second-team all-state, for a team that narrowly missed the playoffs after losing in a Kansas tiebreaker.

When the phone call came saying he was gone — it shocked me. At first, I wasn’t sure what to say to anybody — about anything. After a few weeks, the playoffs in baseball began and things were beginning to get back to normal.

Rooting for some of my favorite teams and booing those that I wanted to fail seemed like a normal thing to do. For the most part it helped then, just as looking at the scrapbook is helping me now.

Jason Elliott is a sports writer for the Coeur d’Alene Press. He can be reached by telephone at 664-8176, Ext. 2020 or via e-mail at jelliott@cdapress.com.