It was a real break with tradition

As Sunday’s Grey Cup final again reminded, they play a different brand of football north of the border.

Up there, they award one point for a ball kicked out of the end zone, they often punt on third down, and after the Grey Cup final has been decided, the winning team takes the massive trophy and breaks it in half.

Actually, that last one is a relatively new tradition. After the British Columbia Lions defeated the Montreal Alouettes, 25-14, Sunday at Winnipeg, a Lions player got a little too excited when given his turn to hoist the trophy and accidentally detached the 94-year-old silver cup from its base.

“I just started shaking it and it snapped,” Lions guard Kelly Bates told the Canadian Press. “I’m still happy, they’ll put it back together and we’ll go get drunk out of it.”

At the same time, Canadian Football League officials have found a way to deal with deadlocked Grey Cup finals in the future. Instructions on the bottom of the trophy read: “In case of tie, break in half.”

Trivia time

Which current NFL player once lost the Grey Cup while taking it to a bar to celebrate?

Cup overflows

Bates is not the first CFL player to break the Grey Cup. The Toronto Globe and Mail listed a few predecessors:

* 1987: The trophy was broken when a celebrating Edmonton Eskimo sat on it.

* 1991: The patched-up trophy, with tape holding the neck intact, returned home with the Toronto Argonauts.

* 1993: The trophy was broken when head-butted by Edmonton’s Blake Dermott.

The Grey Cup was almost destroyed in a 1947 fire while on display at the Toronto Argonaut Rowing Club and was stolen and held for ransom in 1969. When the CFL refused to pay, Toronto police investigated and eventually found the trophy in a hotel locker.

Are nine enough?

Maybe high school football needs to break a few championship trophies in half.

In a Washington Class 4-A quarterfinal game played Saturday, Bothell High needed nine overtimes to eliminate Pasco High, 43-40.

The score was tied, 14-14, at the end of regulation, when the real action began. The nine overtime periods, which extended the game into a fourth hour, included two fumbles, a missed field goal and plenty of dropped passes -- “at least 12 for Pasco,” the Seattle Times reported.

No wonder. Those Pasco receivers had to be exhausted.

Bothell finally ended the marathon on a 10-yard touchdown run by fullback Luke Jones. The game was the longest in Washington high school history and is believed to have equaled the national record.

Trivia answer

Kicker Mike Vanderjagt won the 1997 Grey Cup as a member of the Toronto Argonauts. That November, Vanderjagt took the trophy to a bar in his hometown of Oakville, Ontario, where it was stolen.

The next morning, a college student who had reportedly joked she would pay $100 to have the Grey Cup in her apartment found it in her kitchen. She called the police, and the trophy was returned to a very relieved Vanderjagt.

And finally

During his years at Liverpool, the late English soccer coaching legend Bob Paisley was a three-time winner of the European Cup, now known as the UEFA Champions League. Noting this achievement on the BBC television show Football Focus, host Manish Bhasin commented, “Most managers would give their right arm for a European Cup, and Paisley had three.”

mike.penner@latimes.com