QUESTIONS LINGER AFTER GAME CANCELLATION.

Byline: GERRY GITTELSON

CANYON COUNTRY -- There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of last week's cancellation of the Canyon-Lancaster football game.

At Canyon, an assistant coach requesting anonymity sent an e-mail detailing complaints about Principal Bob Messina's willingness -- or unwillingness -- to reschedule. Also, a parent of one Canyon's top linemen called Lancaster coach Jeff Cortez to complain about Messina.

In Lancaster, Cortez said the whole problem could have been avoided had Antelope Valley school district officials not been so trigger-happy by calling off Thursday's game at just 1 p.m. because of smoke from the Day Fire.

``You know how windy it is up here. By the time 7 p.m. rolled around, it was fine,'' Cortez said. ``They blew it by calling off the game so early. We really wanted to play.''

To rehash the details, playing on Friday didn't work because of a religious holiday, and Saturday didn't work because of logistical reasons involving travel and expenses that for some reason couldn't be managed.

It's clear Canyon's passionate coach, Harry Welch, did all he could, including lining up and paying for transportation so Lancaster could play at Canyon on Saturday. (Lancaster was supposed to host, but its field was in use on Saturday.)

Perhaps if Welch and Messina had met face-to-face instead of trading messages through third parties, the mess could have been settled. Welch secured the bus to bring Lancaster to Canyon, but Messina said there were questions unanswered about liability. If the bus crashed, who would be at fault?

But what about Lancaster? As the host, why couldn't it fix the details instead of Canyon worrying about them?

The whole thing brings me back to a time in the late 1990s, when the Antelope Valley was my beat at the Daily News. It was a trip weaving my way through the politics involving prep sports out there -- and at times I felt like a bully from the big city nit-picking my way through the lives of coaches who were set in their ways.

There were some great people in the High Desert -- among my favorites are the Cox family, featuring former Quartz Hill softball/soccer standouts Jodie and Kellie -- but a lot of grouchy ones, too. Maybe it's the weather that wears some down through the years: unbearably hot half the year and New York-winter cold the other half, and always much too windy.

It has been some years, and here are some classic Antelope Valley prep sports memories, some that made the newspaper and some that didn't:

It was always fun calling tiny Boron, a small-town school with just 100 students or so, but consistently dominant in lower-level football.

For a reporter, it's a long trip to Boron, which is in the middle of nowhere about an hour past Palmdale. But Richie Sheasley, Boron's star player, was always available by phone -- anytime during school hours. I'd call at 10 a.m. or so, and someone from the office would go to Sheasley's classroom -- there were only a few rooms -- and Sheasley would come to the phone to talk about a big game against some opponent like Arrowhead Christian or Mojave that week.

After he graduated and played JC football in Bakersfield, he checked in to tell me how great it was to live in a town with a McDonald's.

I was also high on Summer Richardson, the best of a string of top softball pitchers at Boron. She set several strikeout records, but nobody ever saw her pitch until she participated in the Daily News All-Star Game at Cal State Northridge -- after my push to include her in the event.

I wrote several stories on the Littlerock football manslaughter saga. National recruits Rodney Woods and Marques Raines and another teammate were involved in an attack at a party, and 18-year Christopher O'Leary, a former classmate of the three, died a few hours after being punched and kicked in the head.

All three originally were charged with second-degree murder. Raines and a co-defendant eventually served four-year sentences for manslaughter, and Woods served a year for assault for attacking a fellow student during the fight. Amazingly, both eventually resumed their football careers at Division I universities -- Woods at Oregon and Raines at Southern Mississippi.

An interesting aside to the whole story that never came out was what Woods and Raines managed to do early the next morning after the midnight attack. Both arrived early the following Saturday at the Southern Section state qualifying track meet, and Woods won the long jump and triple jump, and Raines won both hurdle races -- incredible achievement considering they probably only slept an hour or two, if at all.

``They seemed like they were in a great mood,'' said Scott Magoloff, our Daily News reporter who covered the track meet.

One of my first enterprise stories involved spending an entire school day and evening with Matt Leonard, a Palmdale football player who had just signed with Stanford -- and now plays in the NFL. It was a full-page story featuring classic football-hero clich(hrt)s and a few surprises. Leonard's parents hated it, thinking their son came off as a pampered superstar. But Matt loved it.

It seemed the Antelope Valley always had more than its share of crusty coaches. I remember a Palmdale softball coach simply couldn't be bothered to report his box scores for publication. When I suggested it would hurt his best player's chances of being included on the All-Daily News team or in the All-Star event, instead of apologizing he said: ``Well, I guess you just have to do what you have to do.''

A Highland High football coach once hung up the phone when I tried to correct him about one of his player's rushing yardage total from the year before.

The next day, he apologized and explained that he was out of sorts because a student had been in a car accident that morning.

But a year or two later, he got mad at me again when I printed his comments about the All-Golden League selections. I don't know why, though, because in my story I agreed with him. Oh, well.