Earlier this week, you may have seen the video with the five fastest substitute goals in Columbus Crew SC history (if you haven't, scroll up!).

The first part of this Notebook is going to look back at those goals. The second part is going to provide you with a peek behind the curtain as to how that video came to exist. It was quite a journey.

But first, the goals!

HOW THE VIDEO CAME TO BE

All combined, it’s a 53 second video, but it took quite a journey to get there. For fun, and also to provide credit to everyone involved, I thought I would give readers an inside glimpse of how it came to be.

First, Kekuta Manneh subbed into Saturday’s game and scored 36 seconds later. That was certainly important to the process. Absolutely vital.

Shortly after the goal, I got a text from Crew SC Communications Manager Carlos Mojica, asking if I knew the fastest substitute goal in Black & Gold history. I’m a nerd, but not THAT big of a nerd. That’s a piece of knowledge that was not sitting in my brain.

Carlos’ text put me on a mission though. Suddenly, I absolutely NEEDED to know the answer to his question. As soon as I got home that night, I fired off an email to the ever-helpful Rick Lawes at MLS HQ. I had lots and lots of questions. Some of the answers appeared in the Notebook about Manneh’s big night.

For the purposes of this piece, a key answer came courtesy of the data collected by the fine folks at Elias Sports Bureau, which was a list of Crew SC players who have scored within one box score minute of entering the match.

This was a good start. It is important to note, however, that scoresheet minutes are different than elapsed time. If the box score shows someone scored one minute after entering the game, the elapsed time can range from one second to 1:59. Someone scoring two official minutes after entering would have a window of 1:01 to 2:59, so there can be overlaps. Even though Marcelo Carrera scored in the same minute he entered, any of those other goals on the list could have happened in less elapsed time. And these may not be the six fastest substitute goals, since goals scored two box score minutes later could potentially be faster than any of them except Carrera’s. Box score minutes are imprecise.

Lawes had some excellent news for me though. Internally, MLS has to-the-second data. Heinemann’s goal was 1:28 in elapsed time. Finlay’s was 28 seconds. Speas’ was 50 seconds. Manneh’s was 36 seconds.

Now we were getting somewhere! Except that the to-the-second data only goes back to 2009. That left two goals without elapsed time data. So close, yet so far away.

Enter Skyler Schmitt, Crew SC’s Video Production Manager. He started with the club as an intern in 2011 and has been full time since 2012. He’s one of those behind the scenes people that does excellent work with no fanfare.

My thought was that perhaps Skyler could find some video footage of the Garey and Carrera goals so we could determine the elapsed time. I sent him a long string of texts Sunday night explaining my predicament and asking for his help. I didn’t know if this footage would be too difficult to find or if it was even available, not to mention how far down the list of Skyler’s busy priorities my begging would be, but it was worth a shot.

On Monday, Skyler advised that he had a melt of the 1996 game. A melt is raw TV production highlights, so not like a highlight video you would find on a team site or YouTube or whatever. It will have various angles from different cameras and it’s just the raw footage. The melt of each game basically contains the footage that the club would need relating to important game events, such as goals. What I was asking for was much more mundane and specific.

The good news is that, as expected, the melt had footage of Carrera’s goal. The bad news is that the melt, understandably, had no footage of Carrera entering the field. Skyler texted to say the goal clip is about five seconds long and that he could still hear the PA announcer announcing the sub when Carrera scored. He estimated that the goal at less than 15 seconds, but we had no way of knowing for sure. We needed the full game video.

Oh well. We tried.

A short while later, this happened…

Schmitt went to the storage area and one of the first boxes he found contained VHS tapes from the 1996 season. The second tape he grabbed happened to be the one he was looking for. Incredible. Just like that, we were back in business. Well, except that Skyler needed to hook up a VCR and his TV was so modern it no longer had the necessary inputs. Fortunately, Schmitt was able to unearth a TV with that capability.

He texted me his findings.

Nine seconds.

We were on Easy Street now. The club has DVDs of the various in-house and production feeds going back to 2007. Getting the necessary Garey substitution footage would be a piece of cake. We were home free. We were just hoping that Garey’s goal was under a minute because it would create an iron-clad fastest-five list. If it was greater than a minute, we would be in limbo due to the vagaries of box score minutes vs. elapsed time, as discussed earlier.

Skyler went to the DVD binder for the 2008, which contained all of the games for that most Massive of seasons….EXCEPT for September 6, 2008, vs. New England. For whatever reason, the DVDs of that game never made it into the binder way back when. Those DVDs were somewhere, but not where they could be easily found.

We were SO CLOSE, and after our 1996 miracle, we were somehow going to be derailed by the ONE missing 2008 DVD. I was crestfallen. To be so close to having a definitive answer and to come up short was dispiriting to say the least.

A short while later, I got another text from Skyler.

With further searching, he somehow dug up VHS tapes. I told Skyler that all day long I felt like I was rooting helplessly from mission control while he was trying to land on the moon. One small VHS for a man, one giant leap into statistical certainty for mankind.

The final result was 43 seconds for Garey. Perfect! We now had a verifiably indisputable list of the five fastest substitute goals in Columbus Crew SC history.

It started with a request from Carlos Mojica. Then came a two-day email conversation with Rick Lawes, featuring data from Elias Sports Bureau and MLS. Then came numerous text conversations with Skyler Schmitt and Skyler going above and beyond the call of duty with relentless acts of Black & Gold video archeology. Skyler was seriously my hero this week. I cannot thank him enough for his extraordinary efforts.

And after all of THAT, we had our definitive list of fastest Crew SC substitute goals and Skyler was able to make a video to share with the world. That video is 53 seconds long. Its brevity is almost comical considering the multi-day group effort that went into its creation.

Questions? Comments? Seen some DVDs of the 9/6/2008 game lying around somewhere? Feel free to write at sirk65@yahoo.com or via twitter @stevesirk