Archive by Separate Date Field?

We like this module very much, and would like to use it as an archive for both our news and event nodes. It works fine when we assign it to a news node, of course, because it organizes the nodes by date-created. What we need is to have it sort our events node by the date of the actual event, which is a separate cck field. Is this possible? Having News / Events in one archive is by far the best solution for our organization. I know I could do my own views, but the interface for this module is truly ideal for what we need (calendar module is overkill for us). If this is not possible out of the box, could you point me in the right direction? Thanks for your help!