THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Sunday, November 22, 2015

You tend to think about a lot of things you never knew you would when you stumble home from work in the dark, plop yourself down in the recliner, stare at a black TV screen and realize, “Oh, yeah.”

You are thankful someone invented the flashlight, though you wonder why the batteries it takes to run one are so expensive and so hard to find, and how the batteries seem to die way sooner than they should.

But you put up with it, because it lessens the chance of stubbing your toe on a table leg, or walking into a wall, and you figure this power outage caused by Tuesday’s “historic” windstorm can’t go on too much longer, right?

Wrong.

YOU HAVE a smartphone, but you don’t want to use up too much data, and you also want to preserve battery power. So you whip out the trusty radio (youngsters will need to consult the dictionary to discover what a radio is), and you figure there has to be some station keeping its listeners updated on the situation.

After all, you think back to other catastrophes during your lifetime — Mount St. Helens in 1980, Villanova beating Georgetown for the 1985 NCAA men’s basketball title — and recall how the radio played a key role in those events.

OK, the Georgetown game, not so much. But Mount St. Helens … when the famed volcano erupted, AM radio in Spokane was the go-to place for information, as TV was barely past the good ol’ days of channels 2, 4 and 6, just into the phenomenon they now call cable TV, and years away from giving us news around the clock.

Since then, AM stations have morphed mostly into talk-radio channels, leaving what constitutes music these days for the FM dial.

Is it wrong when you look forward to 5 a.m., so you can hear potentially good news from … we’ll call them Jud and Misti — on the aftermath of Windstorm 2015?

They tell you there’s thousands and thousands of others without power as well, so you don’t feel alone — though it doesn’t make you feel any warmer.

You hear that the numbers of those affected by the outage are going down, and that’s good news. You go on social media and see folks boasting about their power coming back, and you get your hopes up — though you also think, %$#^$$#%$!!!

You channel your inner Fred Knoblock — “Why not me?”

You hear a noise in an otherwise quiet neighborhood and you look out the window, hoping to see a truck from the power company rolling by … but it’s a rig with the tree service instead.

Then you hear the news proudly trumpeted that there was power at the Spokane Arena, so the Chiefs could play their two home games this weekend. Let’s see … they play on ice, and the colder the better …

So you soldier on — and wrap another layer of blankets around you — and you remember why the band was named Three Dog Night.

Then, when you’re resigned to a few more days of this, and you’re nearing the point of needing your ice scrapers for the INSIDE of your HOUSE windows, out of the blue comes a quiet rumble, followed by warm air through the vents, and suddenly it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood again.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.