The ESPN franchise has several different channels and one of them, ESPN Classic, is devoted to the reruns of classic sporting events. Lately, they been hyping the 30 year old NCAA basketball championship between Indiana State (Larry Bird) and Michigan State (Magic Johnson). Sometimes, however, they throw out the time requirement if a recent match is worthy of seeing again or showing for those that might have missed it and those matches are dubbed, "instant classics".

While ESPN did show the Handball World Championships on their ESPN360 platform they haven't bought the Champions League rights yet. If they did, however, yesterday's match between Hamburg and Flensburg would surely be an instant classic. I won't give the result away, but I will set the stage. Hamburg won the 1st leg in Flensburg 28-25. Flensburg has been having a down year, so surely they have no chance of beating Hamburg at Hamburg in front of 12,000 fans. On top of that, they need to win on aggregate, which means they must either win by 4 goals or just 3 if they can score 29 goals (away goals is the 2nd tiebreaker).

Link to EHFtv video: http://www.ehftv.com/ec/cl/men/2008-09/video/000515 (Note: you can always fast forward if you don't have time for the whole match)

This is also just the first of 3 quarter-final 2nd leg matches this weekend.

Zagreb at Kiel Saturday, 1700 CET (1st leg result was a 28-28 draw)
Ciudad Real at Veszprem Saturday, 1715 CET (Ciudad Real won the 1st leg 29-24)
Chekov at Rhein-Neckar Lowen, Sunday, 1715 CET (Chekov won the 1st leg 33-31)

These matches can be watched live or on demand, usually around 5 hours after the match is completed. The archive is here: http://www.ehftv.com/ec/cl/search/video

Memo to EHF: If you were to add a premium option with better picture quality, I (and others) will immediately open our wallets.