Elgin City's SPFL season might be put on hold for now, but 20 years ago it was the weather that suspended league football at Borough Briggs for more than 100 days
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JUST like this week, Moray was in the midst of a chilly winter exactly 20 years ago and Elgin City saw football put into cold storage - for 101 days.
That's how much time passed between league matches at Borough Briggs for the Black and Whites, and not as a result of a pandemic sweeping the nation.
The weather took such a turn for the worse in the winter of 2000-2001, that effectively City's football pitch was in a state of permafrost.
Bossed by former Caley Thistle assistant manager Alex Caldwell, the Moray outfit found the step up from Highland League to Scottish League football a real challenge.
Their learning curve must have seemed like a ski-jump ramp, as City took seven games to gain their first win in what was then Division 3, and their struggled continued.
On November 25, 2000, Caldwell's men lost 2-1 at home to East Stirling and were left marooned at the bottom of the league with just two wins in 15 matches - a position they would never recover that season.
What they didn't know at the time was that they would have to wait until March 6 the following year to play their next Division 3 game on home soil.
It makes the current Elgin side's seven weeks of inactivity since their last fixture on Boxing Day seem like a short holiday.
Two decades earlier, after an astonishing 101 days out of action, Borough Briggs was finally declared playable for the 'derby' visit of Peterhead on a Tuesday night and the football famine was over for the Elgin diehards.
The long delay failed to change City's fortunes, however, as a crowd of 524 saw them lose 1-0 to a 71st minute Craig Cooper penalty for the men from the Blue Toon.
City's home ground wasn't entirely out of action during the 101 days, as they did play one Scottish Cup tie in late January.
After several postponements, shoots of green grass emerged from the frost to allow Elgin's clash with Queen of the South to go ahead, exactly nine weeks after their last match there.
But on league duty, the 'game off' sign was almost permanently on show at Borough Briggs over the start of winter, across the festive period and approaching early spring as snow and frost seemed to be an ever-present menace.
City did play four away matches during their enforced home exile, with the climate in southern reaches more inviting than the sub-zero temperatures of the frozen north.
They even won 1-0 at Albion Rovers on February 17 in the match prior to their return to home action against Peterhead, one of just five victories gained on the way to a debut wooden spoon.
Twenty years on, Elgin have yet to find the holy grail of promotion from Scottish football's bottom tier despite some near-misses.
If the present campaign is allowed to resume from suspension, and Gavin Price's men sitting pretty in second place, it could yet be their time for a long-awaited move up in the world.
