Thursday night was one of those nights that drives non-smokers to light up, non-drinkers to pull out that aging bottle of Scotch in the bottom of their office drawers and newspaper editors to quit.

Quit, I won’t.

Paint a brief picture for you that shows why, among other things, newspapering isn’t an exact science, I will.

And oh yeah, I may owe the men’s basketball team an apology. We’ll get to that later.

Background: Everybody who is anybody knew about the game. I’m talking Cyclones and Bruins. You know the rest.

The problem: The game wasn’t scheduled to start until 9:25 p.m. The Daily’s final deadline is 11 p.m. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to realize there’s a potential conflict. Knowing that we would be horribly dated if we waited to run game coverage until Monday — we don’t publish on Saturday and Sunday — we did what any self-respecting college student does when term papers are due. We begged for an extension.

We got it.

And we got a big one. I’m not talking an 11:30 get-in-the-stats, an 11:45 throw-in-a-picture or even a midnight show-me-a-couple-of-quotes. I’m talking a 12:30 a.m. color-photo-on-the-front, full-page-of-game-stuff-on-the-inside.

This I thought was cool because — being the smart editor that I am — I realized that a Sweet 16 game is a pretty big deal, maybe even a really big deal.

So we get all geared up. We hook up our color TV to the huge antenna that’s normally reserved for the police scanner, figuring we could do without monitoring the frequencies for a few hours. We send a photographer and a writer on down to the Alamodome to zip us photos and text via the phone line direct from Texas, figuring we had an extra 90 minutes.

I thought even if the world fell apart we’d still have plenty of time.

I was wrong.

The game before our beloved Cyclone-Bruin showdown, you see, ran a little long. Try two overtimes, or slightly less than an hour, long.

At this point, I’m worried, but not that worried. We’ve still got time, just absolutely no extra time. And we do have the latest technology — digital, darkroomless, cameras and Powerbooks for the story.

We can still do it, I thought. There’s just no room for error.

Then there was an error.

Not our error, mind you, but a flaw, a quirk, another #@%*$! overtime period.

Of all things. A loss, from my meager, selfish standpoint, I could have handled. I would have been disappointed and sad for the team, but I could have done my job. An outright win, obviously, would have been better.

We could have played it up big, ran some color photos and a killer story to celebrate Iowa State’s first trip to the Elite Eight. It would have been cool.

But no. Overtime, again. It was about 12:20 — in the morning that is.

Our extended deadline was about to hit us in the face like a newspaper that’s about to run a white hole on its front page and a completely blank second page of sports. And what’s more, I’m really getting into the game.

So I did what any self-respecting editor would do. I prayed.

I asked the Almighty, silently of course, to end the game.

Here’s where I think I’d better apologize. I forgot, you see, to ask the big guy in the sky to end the game in our favor. I was thinking of that, but that’s not what I asked. And being how I haven’t done any really, really bad things lately, God could very well have granted my request, thinking he was doing me a favor.

Sorry guys.

At any rate, the game finally got over about 12:30 a.m. So I did what any self-respecting college student who had asked for a term-paper deadline extension would do. I missed the deadline.

Daily photo stud Mike Faas and sports guru Chad Calek had indeed planned ahead and had most of their stuff done before the game was over. Chad sent me the game summary before starting on a dead sprint to wherever Tim Floyd and Dedric Willoughby had wandered. He got some quotes and we got a story — a pretty good story, I thought.

It wasn’t perfect coverage, mind you. Example: It’s “Kelvin” Cato, not “Calvin” Cato, like we printed.

But newspapering really isn’t an exact science, especially at 1 a.m. without God on your side.

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Chris Miller is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown. He is editor in chief of the Daily.