Tales From The Dark Side

Your mother always said, "Nothing good happens after midnight," but in sports the breadth of human experience happens while you sleep: births, deaths, punch-outs, break-ins, triumphs and tragedies. Pack the past few weeks into a night, and you'll see: As with icebergs or Indy-car drivers, most of sports is hidden from view.

Midnight At a Kentucky Derby party in Louisville , Archie Manning gets up on stage to stand with his sons Eli and Peyton while they sing You Never Even Called Me by My Name, which works every country music theme into a single song:

I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison

And I went to pick her up in the rain

But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck

She got runned over by a damned old train.

12:06 a.m. After Cam Keith scores to give the Alaska Aces a triple-overtime win to advance to the semifinals of the East Coast Hockey League championship, he skates and slides the length of the ice in celebration.

1:50 a.m. Chargers linebacker Steve Foley is arrested following a traffic violation in San Diego on charges of resisting arrest, battery on a police officer and being drunk in public. (In a final indignity, his Range Rover is impounded for having expired Arkansas tags.)

2:00 a.m. To his great surprise a University of Delaware football player wakes to find a former University of Delaware football player burglarizing his apartment.

2:15 a.m. While driving his BMW on I-76 after a visit to a Denver club, Nuggets rookie Julius Hodge is shot four times by someone in a passing vehicle.