If you arrive at the stadium and discover your tickets are back home in Ohio, the customer service office of the ticket department can usually help. The office is directly behind the lobby area where I work, so my coworker and I get involved in almost every request arising from a ticket problem.

We get a wide variety - print at home didn't work; forgot them; left them in a pocket and they went through the wash; kid in the back seat on the way to the game ripped off the bar code used to scan for entry; and so on. The people who arrive with a hard little lump of cardboard are always surprised to know that they are not the first to run the tickets through the washing machine!

So last night when a man arrived with tickets ripped into two pieces, we didn't pay a whole lot of attention, and sent him back to talk to the ticket staff. THEN here come two kids, one about 16 and the other about 11, saying their tickets had been stolen, and we sent them back to talk to the ticket staff. Turns out the two situations were related, and there was A LOT more to the story.

We pieced together that the man had 4 tickets altogether and had been on the sidewalk about 4 blocks from the stadium, attempting to unload two extras.* As he held two tickets up, two teenaged boys ran past him, and grabbed the tickets from his hand. They scuffled, and the tickets got torn. The kids ran away.

The boys' story was that THEIR tickets had been lost, they admitted they had probably dropped them, and they had jumped to the conclusion that they had found the thief. In a bizarre twist stranger than fiction, the boys were right, they had dropped the tickets. In a very unusual gesture quite early in our shift, two people came to the lobby, and gave us two tickets they had found on the sidewalk as they were walking over from the shuttle bus.

So NOW in another bizarre twist, they all ended up in the ticket service office at the same time. Things got heated, the man wanted to have the kids arrested, so we called the cops.

The lobby filled up with officers - it must have been a slow night, because we had ten of them in there, most of them just standing around, but I could tell it unnerved the kids. So, eventual outcome - (1) Dad on other end of a cellphone conversation confirmed that the lost tickets turned into us were the ones he gave his kids. (2) Man who had been trying to sell his extras was eventually dissuaded from pressing charges. (3) His ripped tickets were reprinted and he went into the game. (4) Cops agreed to release the tickets to the kid and they went into the game.

By the time it was over, the older of the two boys had a small (and probably embarrassing) track of tears heading down each cheek. The younger of the two sat still, stayed quiet, and looked scared.

Since this was a situation when it seemed to me that everyone was right to some extent, the only real problem was the kid jumping to the conclusion that he had found his stolen tickets. (The preprinted season tickets all have the same photograph on them, and a casual glance will not tell you the seat location) And all youthful swagger was gone when he realized how much commotion he was causing, all he wanted to do was talk to his dad. And who knows what Dad thought, but his help during the phone call was the factor which sorted out the confrontation, and got all three of them on their way to watch the Rockies remember how to play baseball and win over the Padres.

*This practice is not illegal in Denver, if all you want is the price printed on the ticket - in other words, you want to recover the $$ you spent for tickets you will not use. However, you cannot conduct this kind of transaction on the sidewalks immediately adjacent to the stadium. You have to be at least across the street. so the guy unloading tickets a few blocks away was within the law. The kids accosting him and grabbing the tickets were, technically, committing petty theft.