We disappointed readers who opened their Sunday, Jan. 27 papers searching for a game story on the Mid-Pacific boys basketball team's huge upset of No. 1 Punahou and found instead a linescore buried on the page that made no mention of what a momentous contest it was.

Tracking down what happened, I discovered a series of issues that I'm hoping we can avoid in the future.

The first problem was that it was a busy sports night, not just in preps but everywhere else. We had Colt Brennan in the Senior Bowl, the Turtle Bay Championship, the University of Hawai'i's men's and women's basketball victories over Idaho, another coach joining the UH football team and a mixed martial arts tournament at Blaisdell Arena. With a full slate of games in college basketball, the NBA, NFL, golf, the sports agate and the sports wire, sports editors made the choice to stick to one page of prep sports.

We painted ourselves into a corner with that decision and there was little wiggle room.

We had 11 OIA basketball games and 10 ILH basketball games, including the girls' championship game. Then there were the Division I and II soccer championships. Reporter Kyle Sakamoto covered the soccer matches and Wes Nakama attended the Punahou girls' championship game. By the time he entered the Punahou gym, the Mid-Pac/Punahou boys game was over and graduating seniors were being honored. He was not aware of Mid-Pac's upset or star player Marcus Holyfield's 34 points to lead his team to victory.

When we did find out about the upset, at about 9 p.m., eight pages in sports had already been designed. To have had a separate story on Mid-Pac would have meant a total page revision and nothing was capable of being cut or rewritten at that point without a costly delay.

"Making changes to accommodate that game would have meant missing the deadline by a half-hour to 45 minutes," said Curtis Murayama, our sports editor. "It's one of those issues, where if basketball is moved from Page 2 to 3, then stories on 3 must move to 4, and then stories get downsized."

Murayama and sports editors have felt the pressure more this season than in the past because of the administrative decision to move boys and girls basketball to the same season, where many games are played back to back in the same gymnasium.

"Instead of 10 or so box scores from games for us to type, compile and write a brief for, we now have more than 20," he said.

On the night of the Mid-Pac upset, the sports staff compiled 21 box scores and 21 briefs, two box scores from UH games, six box scores from Division II college games, five briefs for the Isle File while five writers filed seven stories on deadline.

Nakama did an admirable job of explaining on his blog the problems we had and apologized for the short shrift we gave the game. He also followed up in the Jan. 28 paper with a full game story. The next day, he made Mid-Pac's Holyfield the athlete of the week.

We made the best of a difficult situation. I still feel dissatisfied with not giving that upset the space it deserved and perplexed that we couldn't adjust on the fly — but satisfied that we'll be prepared next time.

Mark Platte is senior vice president/editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. Reach him at mplatte@honoluluadvertiser.com or 808-525-8080.