A great amount of planning and specific scheduling goes into the made-for-TV "Hockey Day in Minnesota," which happened this year on Jan. 19 and included 21 consecutive hours of hockey-related programing from multiple levels of the sport on Fox Sports North.

Wednesday's schedule is the opposite. It is the byproduct of Minnesota's cool April air, time zone differences and, well, coincidence.

The Twins, Timberwolves and Wild all play Wednesday — in three different cities, no less. And their games are spread out in such a manner that all three can be shown on FSN, their primary TV destination. From 2:30 p.m. until 12:30 a.m., counting pregame and postgame, there is wall-to-wall local sports. It is the first tripleheader ever of this sort on FSN's primary channel.

"It is rare to have them all play on the same day in a time frame that works like this," said Mike Dimond, Senior Vice President and General Manager of FSN. "It takes a lot to air one game, let alone three from separate venues."

The Twins, with a tip of the cap to chilly early April conditions, are playing afternoon weekday games during their first homestand. First pitch against the Tigers is slated for 3:10 p.m., after the pregame show.

The plan is for the game to flow nicely into a postgame show around 6 p.m. and then a Timberwolves pregame show at 6:30 p.m., but as we all know baseball has no clock. Monday's nine-inning opener took 3 hours, 28 minutes for a 4-2 Tigers victory.

Regardless, it seems safe to assume the game will at worst be over by 7 p.m., when the Wolves are slated to play at Milwaukee. None of the past 10 Wolves games have lasted longer than 2 hours, 20 minutes, so the Wild's 9:30 start at San Jose shouldn't be impacted. If any games run together, FSN's plan is to stay with the initial game and use cut-ins from the next game or pregame show via a two-box screen.

That Wild game at San Jose, by the way, was on the original schedule. This is not some lockout reconfiguration. It's just part of a 10-hour sports marathon.

A jogger could run two actual marathons in that time. You could be like that runner, only on a couch.

MICHAEL RAND