There clearly should be special arrangements made here to allow Patrick to finish his game and play the other games, or at least give him time to finish. I think Mike has done that in the past in case of extenuating circumstances.

I don't know what is up with Mike, but hopefully you can get a response from him. Patrick, you might email the other owner so he knows what is going on, too.

The reason for the harshness of the rule is that several years ago we had players who were abusing the practice of allowing replays. These guys would apparently deliberately crash a game they were losing to get replays. Because they were requesting a large number of replays, this policy was added to the manual (or perhaps enforced more strictly).
I think an exception might be made on a one-time basis.

Good luck,
Dave N