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	Knute Rockne  Durnat

The rules say I get 24 hours, but they don't say where I get them, so I'm using time zones and fast jets to see three events.

It starts on a Friday night in Zurich, Switzerland, where I catch a downtown tram to suburban Stadion Letzigrund to watch the Weltklasse, the best single-day track meet in the world. An hour before the first race, the standing-room-only corral at the top of the first turn is filled to a frenetic capacity. Soon after, the streetcorner stadium is crammed with more than 24,000 track nuts. To an American fan starved for company, it is a slice of heaven. The evening begins with a slate of "B" races, in which runners who couldn't get lanes in the main events routinely scorch world-class times. Before it is over, the girders will shiver for more than three hours, records will fall and I will stagger into the night drained, trying to remember it all.

I snag the early Swissair nonstop to Chicago, touch down at O'Hare a little after 9:00 Saturday morning and I'm in my rental car by 9:15, bound for the Indiana toll road and South Bend, where Notre Dame and Michigan kick off at noon. There are plenty of places in the U.S. -- Lincoln, State College, Clemson, Athens, Austin -- where a college football Saturday has the power to transform adults into children. But nowhere in the country is the history and tradition of the Saturday Game as palpable as it is at Notre Dame. Love the Fighting Irish or hate them, South Bend is college football's mecca. I walk the parking lot among the tailgaters, pause to look at the mural of Touchdown Jesus and on the way to my seat, run my fingers along the bricks of the inner walls of the stadium, knowing that Rockne once did the same.

Back at O'Hare for an early evening flight to Boston and the first round of the Beanpot hockey tournament at the Fleet Center. Two games match the city's four Division I powers: Boston College, Boston University, Harvard and Northeastern. Six hours of breathtaking, passionate hockey played by a bunch of kids who went to high schools and prep schools within an hour's drive of the building. The fans are young, unfailingly knowledgeable (just ask any of them) and more than a little oiled. I'll take the college version of almost any sport over the professional one, but doubly so in hockey, where the game is full of small, quick-skating forwards who won't be big or strong enough to play in the NHL, but who cover college ice like waterbugs. If I'm lucky, both games go into overtime, the second crawling into the small hours of Sunday morning and breaking the rules of this fantasy game.