In 2003, a year after graduating from Syracuse University, I decided to attend the NCAA Tournament games in Boston. My sister and I made the four hour drive from Delaware County New York to Boston, Massachusetts. On an unrelated note, my sister brought a grand total of TEN DOLLARS for this three day trip! So I spent a ton of money on eBay to buy tickets (since I waited until Syracuse was officially assigned to Boston) and then had to fund a two person trip to Boston, all while working with substitute teacher pay.
This was the first time we had seen Syracuse play, in person, during the NCAA Tournament. The first round game was an uneventful victory against Manhattan. Manhattan played tough for a while, but in reality the game was never in jeopardy. Round two was against a tough Oklahoma State team. In the first half the Cowboys jumped out to a big lead and completely shut down Syracuse freshman stud, Carmelo Anthony. Things didn’t look good, but a furious rally made the game look like an easy Syracuse twelve point win.
It should be noted that I also made the trip to Albany, this time with a friend who brought more than TEN DOLLARS and a mere two hour drive from home, to see the Regional Semifinal game against Auburn. Unfortunately, a combination of a snowstorm and lack of funding kept me from attending the Regional Final game against Oklahoma. I consider my attendance in three of the six NCAA Tournament games that year to be the good luck charm for the only Syracuse National Championship.
All of you fans can finally rest peacefully, because as long as Syracuse makes it out of the first weekend and is in the East Region I, the good luck charm, will be back at NCAA Tournament games. This time, my wife, sister, brother-in-law and baby niece will be making the trip to Boston. My wife who only puts up with Syracuse games because she is madly in love with me agreed to this trip for a simple reason; we are expecting a baby in July and she wanted a weekend getaway, since they will be few and far between after July. She also volunteered to be the traveling nanny for my niece while the rest of us go to the games.
This finally brings me to the main “point” of this post; how we came about getting the tickets. Things have changed since 2003. Back then there weren’t many places on the internet to acquire tickets. Now there are tons of places. However, most of the places we looked for tickets wanted between $350 and $400 per ticket for both sessions. So factoring in the ticket brokerage fee, shipping and other hidden fees we were looking at a minimum of $1200 for the three tickets. This was doable, but we wanted to get tickets as cheap as possible. From attending the 2003 NCAA games and a U2 concert a few years back I knew that there really aren’t bad seats in the TD Garden (or whatever it is called these days).
We continued to search internet ticket brokers looking for cheaper seats. Finally, we stumbled across tickco.com and found all session tickets priced at $200. This looked too good to be true, so I immediately questioned the validity of this site. However, after some research I found less negative reviews about this site than most other ticket sites and most of the negative reviews had to do with the shipping methods, not the actual tickets. So we decided to purchase these tickets for a total of about $750 including all the shipping and brokerage fees.
Our tickets were delivered within two days to my parents’ house, since a signature was required and the four of us actually going to the games would be at work. My mother opened the envelope and found that we only had tickets to the first session! We were not happy and immediately went to the website to make sure we had been looking under the “All Sessions” tab. It looked like we were looking in the right place and should have been purchasing tickets to both sessions. My sister, who paid for the tickets on her credit card since I didn’t want to fall victim to the TEN DOLLAR scam again, called the company. Tickco.com looked up the listing and said we were correct we should have been purchasing tickets to both sessions. Tickco then took our information so they could call us back and said they were going to contact the seller.
The next day Tickco got back to us and told us that the seller did not have, or claimed not to have, the tickets to the other session. At this point things didn’t look good for us getting our session two tickets. However, Tickco shocked us with their response. Since the listing was considered a mislisting and we should have been purchasing tickets for both sessions they found us session two tickets and sent them to us at NO additional cost. I was very impressed with their customer service and the way they handled the situation so quickly.
So to summarize this story; we are going to the games in Boston and because of a ticket seller’s mislisting we got the seats at an excellent aftermarket price! Who knows maybe I will see some of you there!
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