Nobody involved was really aware of it at the time, but there was a rumbling shudder that coursed across the press-blog continuum this past Tuesday night. A pay-television sports show dedicated a segment to sports coverage on the web. The panel discussion featured America's most popular sports blogger, a Pulitzer-winning author, and some dude who plays football.

From the fallout posted here on the interweb, it would seem that all hell broke loose on HBO's Costas Now. Poor Will Leitch practically lived out that R.E.M. song about talk shows, ambushed by a crazy has-been writer, while an athlete sat in the corner wondering if he was in the right universe.

Me, I didn't get to see the segment until it was posted online yesterday (the show is carried on a channel I haven't received since Flight of the Conchords last aired). It certainly wasn't as explosive as everyone made it out to be, which was a bit of a disappointment. In fact, I'm just surprised how bad everyone looked coming out of it. From Bob Costas (the Voice of the Olympics) saying "fuck-face," to the athlete's description of his own web egosurfing, to the aged one's mouth-froth. Oh, the mouth-froth.

I thought it would never happen, but this past summer I was recognized and stopped on the street by a complete stranger for the first time in my life. Granted, it was the street of a college campus, and I make my living off college basketball, but it was still weird.

"Hey, aren't you Kyle Whelliston?"

It was uncomfortable for sure, I wasn't quite prepared to answer questions about basketball in July. I was just trying to get to a Store 24 and get a candy bar because I had skipped lunch and was hungry as a motherfucker. As the 3 Musketeers melted in my mouth, I thought a lot about how I wouldn't mind if my life was never interrupted by strangers again. Especially if the question was, "Didn't you used to be Kyle Whelliston?"

After living in New York and Philadelphia for many years, I know my vandalism. Entire quadrants of those metropolises have been given over to the imperial aerosol kids, who take possession of signs, vehicles, buildings and bridges by way of spray-painted symbology. With their tags and codes, they tell each other who owns what, and any street or place in view of the marking is dominated by proxy. Outsiders and downtowners can't begin to pretend to understand the language, but the basic message is very clear: this doesn't belong to you.

The other night, I was sitting in the Providence Place food court, watching as the girl behind the counter at the Dale & Thomas popcorn stand slipped a small wad of bills from the till into her pocket. I found myself distracted from the scene by the piped-in muzak, which normally hides in the background of the shopping experience but had become surprisingly intrusive.

The 2004 Boston Red Sox were a magical team, insofar as they transformed the psyche of an entire region. They even reached out to touch the lives of non-Sox fans like myself. A true story: October 16, 2004, the date of Game 3 of that year's American League Championship Series, was when my wife and I became engaged to be married on the platform of an Orange Line MBTA station. The game drifted in and out of our evening out in Boston, score updates coming from restaurant televisions and bus drivers and strangers on the street. The highly improbable final score, 19-8, corresponds to the dates in May upon which we were both born. Of course, it was the last game the 2004 Red Sox would lose, and we felt like we had tapped into the mythology, curse or no curse.