Traveling Zambonis

"Hello, Quinnipiac? It's Yale. Do you have a cup of sugar we can borrow? Oh, yeah. And a Zamboni, too? Thanks."

OK, that wasn't the exact conversation. But it was close. One of Yale's Zamboni's broke down Saturday morning. Mechanics were called in to check under the hood and fix the problem. Still, officials weren't confident the ice surfacing machine could make it through that evening's ECAC Hockey playoff game with Harvard. Yale still had one working Zamboni. But after the fiasco at Harvard a few weeks earlier, when the school's only machine broke down on the ice and delayed the game by two hours, Yale didn't want to leave anything to chance. So Wayne Dean, Yale's associate director of athletics, called Quinnipiac athletic director Jack McDonald at 4 p.m. and asked to borrow one of the school's Zambonis. McDonald said 'Of course,' one was loaded onto the flat bed you see above and whisked down Whitney Avenue, arriving at Ingalls Rink about a half hour before game time.

It was an odd scene, seeing the Quinnipiac logo steam around Ingalls between periods. And it might have been the first time in rink history the Zamboni was booed. Still, Dean said afterward that he couldn't thank McDonald enough for coming through in a pinch after Saturday's game.

By the way, Quinnipiac also came through for Springfield's Mass Mutual Center on Saturday, too. The press tables for the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference basketball tournament broke. So Quinnipiac loaded theirs onto another truck and hauled them up I-91 for the event.