RACINE, Wis. – A little housecleaning nearly cost the Rev. Walter Hermanns a seat at Sunday’s National Football Conference championship game.

Hermanns, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, was getting some help from a friend last Friday when he asked him to take care of a stack of papers left in a bin for shredding.

When his friend got to four Green Bay Packers tickets bundled together with a rubber band, he took off the band, put one in the shredder and then stopped short.

“Something rang a bell and he said, ‘Are you sure you want to shred these?'” Hermanns said.

Too late. The ticket was in shreds.

They emptied the shredder, collected pieces of the ticket and put them in a plastic bag. A call to the Packers’ ticket office remedied the situation, but not without some explaining.

“It almost sounded like they had heard crazy stories like this before,” Hermanns said.

It helped that he had purchased the tickets with a credit card, still had three remaining tickets and had gotten the tickets through a special lottery for handicapped-accessible seats.

Twins earn perfect college entrance test scores

BELLEVUE, Neb. – Brian and Ross DeVol are a perfect match, genetically and academically: The identical twins earned perfect ACT scores.

The seniors at suburban Bellevue East High School both scored 36 on the college entrance exam, though Ross DeVol needed three tries. One of his earlier tries netted a 35.

The 18-year-old brothers have maintained straight-As through high school, and both are in the running for class valedictorian.

“We’re pretty competitive,” Ross DeVol said.

The twins have already won household bragging rights. Their older brother, John, earned a 33 the first time he took the ACT and didn’t try again.

Ross DeVol said his older brother has been joking about retaking the test since the twins earned their perfect scores.

The brothers are both good in physics and are considering the University of Nebraska or Creighton University in Omaha as their college choices, but they haven’t yet decided.

Ross DeVol said he wants to become a doctor or a psychiatrist. Brian DeVol has said he wants to become an actuary.

The DeVols are only the third pair of students in the past decade to earn perfect scores in the same year and share the same address, ACT spokeswoman Kristin Crouse said. Crouse couldn’t say whether the others were twins.

About one out of every 4,000 graduates who took the ACT last year scored a 36. The average score in Nebraska was 22.1, and the national average was 21.2.