Web sites pop up faster than Buckeye leaves on the back on Steve Bellisari’s helmet these days. They vary in value, content, design and numerous other things, but many of them share one common trait – like real Buckeye leaves, they don’t survive.This is no different for Ohio State-related sites. Imagine being a fan and finding out about an incredible site that has the freshest information on players, games and recruiting. After making the site your homepage and telling all your crazed Buckeye friends about it, it can vanish suddenly, leaving you out of luck. This is an all too realistic scenario for Buckeye fans.”Web sites would do a good job for a while and then fold up after the owner tired or ran out of cash,” said Ed White, an OSU fan living in Chicago.For years OSU fans, like White, wondered if anybody would be able to handle the demands of maintaining an accurate Web site.Enter John Porentas.Porentas, whose educational background is in science, was selling glass beads coast to coast for a fashion company when he wandered onto the Internet about five years ago. He has basically stayed there ever since. He is the creator of www.go-bucks.com, which is better known as the O-Zone.”I was a single parent and had a high school student at home and he was very much involved in the Internet,” Porentas said. “As a parent you want to know what your kid is doing. Is he out there looking at porn? What’s he doing? So I got involved with the Internet and the first thing I typed in was Ohio State football.”The Buckeyes have been a passion of Porentas since 1963 when he was a high school student. He was living in Toledo at the time, and was one of the 36,424 spectators that saw OSU play Michigan in Ann Arbor. Porentas said that game, which OSU won 14-10, hooked him on Ohio State football.His Internet search provided him with a patchwork site that focused on OSU recruiting.”It was a little lame,” he said.That site went off-line, but another recruiting site surfaced to the net. That one, too, bit the dust and Porentas was left with nothing. He began to frequent other amateur sites devoted to college athletics and found his rallying call.”I began going to Michigan and Notre Dame sites just to get news on football and I saw posts on message boards that said Ohio State sites go away, they don’t survive,” he said.Porentas, who is known as Mr. Ed to his readers, began to think that he would be able to maintain a Web site that provided accurate information on the Buckeyes. He planned on repeating what he heard around Columbus because there was no one reporting firsthand on the Internet.There was one little problem.”I was totally clueless about how that got done,” Porentas said.Porentas, who is known as Mr. Ed to O-Zone readers, brought in a couple of partners. One of them was very knowledgeable with the ins and outs of html programming, and on October 31, 1996 the O-Zone was formed. “It was going to be something that I would do for people like me,” Porentas said. “I lived away from Columbus for a long time and I couldn’t get any Buckeye news. It was killing me.”I thought that if there were 100 people that lived away from Columbus and I could do this service for them, then it would be worth doing,” he said. Porentas never imagined that his newly created site would be attracting 15,000 visitors by its third day in existence, but it was. Since then the O-Zone has undergone several facelifts. Porentas and his original two partners split ways and the O-Zone welcomed in J.C. Pennington and Jerry Lease. Pennington, a past sports editor of The Lantern, adds 35 years of publishing experience while Lease, a real-estate developer, brings a businessman’s attitude to the O-Zone.Porentas and Pennington do most of the reporting and writing for the site. Porentas said he works 15 to 19 hours a day, seven days a week for the O-Zone.Bill Kurelic, publisher and editor of The Ohio Football Recruiting News, was added to the staff as well. He follows the recruiting process first hand and is an excellent source for O-Zone surfers. A fan forum, or message board, was added and continues to a be a favorite spot for regular visitors. The O-Zone also expanded its coverage. Besides football, the site now covers baseball, hockey and basketball. Porentas said the site gets around three million page views a month which he believes correlates to about 30,000 core visitors. Porentas believes that about 6,000 visitors live around central Ohio.Despite the larger number of visitors, Porentas said he would never consider selling subscriptions to the O-Zone. “The Internet is meant to be free,” he said. “The only places that can charge subscriptions on the Internet are The Wall Street Journal and porn sites. Everything else needs to be free.”The site is supported by advertisers, such The Buckeye Corner, and by contributions. Porentas said he has received contributions ranging from $5 to $1,000.Tom Green is an avid O-Zone visitor who lives in Westminster, Colo., a suburb of Denver.”I have had the O-Zone bookmarked pretty much since day one of their existence,” Green said. “The O-Zone continues to be an umbilical for me, here, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Without it I would only know what I glean from the vapid talking heads, spouting off about that which they know very little about, during the games.”Green, a regular on the message board, watches OSU games in a Denver sports bar. “I meet with a group of 50-plus fans at a sports bar in downtown Denver, and the O-Zone has padded that number,” he said.The O-Zone provides its readers with factual information, but also gives them something more, said Chris Walinski of Dartmouth, Mass.”I enjoy the camaraderie of being with other fans,” he said. “I consider the Northeast the vast wasteland of college football and the O-Zone helps me escape the know-nothings who espouse Doug Flutie as being the end-all of the college football world.”Despite the long days and never-ending demands of 30,000 fans, Porentas couldn’t be happier.