There are only a handful of sporting events each year where the word “event” is truly appropriate, games that draw in even passing sports fans and sometimes non-sports fans. The pandemic has reduced that number but also made more of them TV-only “events,” must-watches for any serious sports fan.

As fate would have it, two that qualify in the eyes of Hawaii sports fans wound up head to head this weekend: UH’s football opener at UCLA in the iconic Rose Bowl vs. the Honolulu Little League team playing Michigan for a spot in the Little League World Series championship game. Both were set to start at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, so which to watch? In the immortal words of Sophie Zawistowska, “Why not both?”

After the pandemic brought my son home from college, he bought a TV for his room. They’re cheap enough now and it doubles as a second monitor when he’s working on his laptop (though everytime I peek into his room while he’s studying it’s showing K-pop videos).

Since the moment he told me he will leave the TV behind when he returns to campus this fall, I’ve had designs on adding it to our living room for NFL Sundays. I don’t have a big enough house to have a man cave (nor do I, frankly, have a desire for one), but there are plenty of fall Sundays when I find myself flipping between two games. It would come in handy, to say the least, and since we cut the cord early last year, it would be easy to do. Though I’d rather have been able to watch Saturday’s games back to back, this gave me a chance to give the set-up a test run.

Well, for an hour or so anyway. An early special teams blunder and UCLA’s superior athleticism had Hawaii down 31-3 early in the second quarter and allowed me to focus on the baseball game, which had considerably more drama, if ultimately no happier a result.

Once the one-loss Michigan team had eliminated the Hawaii boys by handing them their first loss of the tournament (scratches head), I was out the door to fetch my family some brunch, even though UH-UCLA was only midway through the third quarter.

But that hour showed me more than enough to make me a believer. I got to see Dawn Davenport’s piece on how Hawaii is paying tribute to the late Colt Brennan without missing Julie Foudy’s interview with Little Leaguer Zack Bagoyo and his coach father, Kevin, a family I’ve known for nearly 40 years, since meeting Kevin’s brother, Anthony, when we were in seventh grade at Highlands Intermediate, where their mom, Corinne, was my teacher.

It allowed me to see dynamic (if not exactly NFL caliber) Bruins quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson try to hurdle Warriors defensive back Chima Azunna without missing Michigan’s mustachioed preteen phenom Cameron Thorning hitting what proved to be the decisive home run against Honolulu.

It worked well with baseball and football, which both have plenty of downtime, though might not be as good with basketball, which has more constant motion and scoring.

I anticipate it will work well with two football games, since an hour of clock time results in a three-hour broadcast, but it only includes 10-12 minutes of game action and approximately triple that of Joe Buck pontificating. I’m already looking at the schedule to see when there might be an especially enticing pair of games going head-to-head. My first target is Week 3, when we could have Chiefs-Chargers on KGMB and Saints-Patriots on KHON.

I have one more takeaway from Saturday I wanted to bring up since it’s something I saw a lot of Hawaii viewers mention after the Little Leaguers lost to Michigan. As I alluded to above, Hawaii was eliminated with one loss even though Michigan also had one loss (to Hawaii on Wednesday). The same thing happened on the other side of the draw, where South Dakota was eliminated by its first loss Saturday to Ohio, which had lost to California six days earlier.

So Michigan won the title Sunday despite having the same number of losses as Hawaii and South Dakota. I noticed this odd format — they call it modified double elimination — several years ago. In the traditional double-elimination format, the team coming out of the losers bracket has to beat the team from the winners bracket twice to eliminate them. But in the modified version, which the LLWS adopted 10 years ago, the one-loss team need only beat the unbeaten team once.

The reason for this format? When asked about that by the website Grantland in 2011, Patrick Wilson, then the organization’s vice president of operations but recently elevated to COO, was paraphrased in the following way by writer Shane Ryan: “He said it reduced erratic scheduling, when too many games occurred on one day and not enough on another.”

He also mentioned numerical tiebreakers, but what Ryan wrote there seems to hint that the key, to Wilson, was unpredictable scheduling. My interpretation of that? The LLWS did away with the “if necessary” game generated by both teams having one loss because of TV. I’m guessing ABC, which broadcasts the title games, didn’t like the uncertainty of when the deciding game would be played. If it was true double elimination, Saturday’s game would have been followed by another game at, say, noon Hawaii time, which would mean ABC pre-empting some of its programming, possibly leaking into prime time on the East Coast.

Ultimately, it seems like the Little League organization chose its broadcast partner — and money — over what’s fair. It’s not the choice I would’ve made — not nearly — but I understand it.

Of course, you won’t hear the Honolulu Little Leaguers complain about this. Before Saturday’s game they were honored as showing the best sportsmanship at the LLWS. In fact, I reached out to coach Kevin Bagoyo via text to ask if the coaches had any thoughts on that and he refused to play the victim.

He said the team had zero complaints with the format or how it played out. “We knew from the beginning that was the set-up. … Winning would’ve just solved everything.”

Reach Sjarif Goldstein at sgoldstein@staradvertiser.com.