Today, if you have a collection, whether it's of Elvis Presley's hair, the many typewriters of Ann Landers, or every check ever made out by Ty Cobb, and if you didn't obtain at least part of that collection via auction, there would appear to be something wrong with you.

We've become eBay Nation.

The process by which collecting something outside the mainstream (art, stamps and coins) went from being a dirty secret to an interesting quirk took ages. The next step, to pervasive hobby, went faster than the average eBay auction -- and obviously it's primarily because of the Internet. Today, not only can you buy the kitsch of the world from the comfort of your laptop, but, perhaps more important, you don't have to ask anybody for it. If you're hopelessly addicted to memorabilia from the Schwebebahn -- the monorail suspended above the river in Wuppertal, Germany -- you no longer have to admit this to anybody but the guy from whom you're buying its commemorative ashtray.

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Well, he was damned right.

A whining sacroiliac sent me to the chiropractor's last week and the X-rays proved my old boss literally correct. I am part of that hidden minority, the spinal mutants, who have six lumbar vertebrae instead of the customary five. I do have too much backbone.

This was the final sign that it was time to do something that for months has been crystallizing out of the gauzy haze of the unconsciousness that surrounds us all: I need to apologize to ESPN.

This began to become evident weeks ago when the deputy mayor of Indianapolis attacked Chris Mortensen, one of my reportorial role models. I once watched Mort protect a source who not only publicly denied what he'd told Mort in private but also questioned his ethics. Just this month, Mort went on the air and criticized the thoroughness of his own reporting on a story. Mortensen is the gold standard, and this hack politician slashed him and said ESPN was "a sports channel first and a news organization fifth." I was amazed to find my hackles rising and myself rushing to defend my old employers on my radio sportscast.

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Nothing, generation after generation of them have concluded, brings alive a great moment of the past, or helps the reader to understand its context, better than an irony or twist in its minutia.

Who writes about the First World War without mentioning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? And who writes about Ferdinand without mentioning that his chauffeur hung a right at the wrong intersection and had to pull to a stop directly in front of the place where Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip was standing?

What story of the Civil War is complete without the journey of Wilmer McLean? He was a Virginia farmer who had a house near Manassas Junction, Va. After the first major battle of the war was fought along the banks of the stream that McLean's home overlooked -- Bull Run Creek -- Wilmer moved his family far away, for safety's sake. He picked a place called Appomattox Court House. Grant and Lee would use his new home for the signing of the armistice four years later.

Edmund Morris opened his first book on Theodore Roosevelt not with his subject's first day as president, nor the occasion of his charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba, but rather on Jan. 1, 1907, as T.R. shook hands with hundreds of ordinary citizens as part of the "open house" tradition of New Year's Day at the White House.

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He was pointing to the previous night's ratings of "The Big Show," a little car crash we used to televise nightly on MSNBC, which, by that time, had been all-Monica Lewinsky for about four months. His thumbnail was aligned with the downward line, one so rapidly plunging that it was nearly straight, so ominous that it could have been the mathematical plotting of the old cliché "going to hell in a handbasket."

"This, right here, this is where Barney Frank said no, he wouldn't like to comment about the president and Miss Lewinsky," my exec said, and then, moving his thumbnail all the way down the plummeting line, down to where it crashed to a halt nearly at the bottom of the graph, down where it took a sudden left and flattened out to a cool, serene negligibility, he continued. "And this, right here, this is where you said, 'OK, neither do I, so let's talk about voting reform instead.'"

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In fact, she'd only been at the head of her homeroom since 1942, but for us seventh-graders 1942 might have been a date from Julius Caesar's reign. She was friendly but formidable, and what, if any, connection she had to the world outside school eluded us. In retrospect, it took a good deal of courage for me to hand her the note my mother had scribbled asking her permission for me to miss school on Oct. 15, 1969.

She looked up at me with unalloyed shock. My plans were doomed.

And then she smiled, broadly and warmly. "You're going to the World Series? Have you got an extra ticket?"

They were all like that. Mr. Motylinski, the science teacher who looked like nothing less than a proto-Nathan Lane, not only accepted my carrying a transistor radio and earphone into class, but periodically called on me for the score. Mr. Bub, the hard-assed phys ed teacher who once fended off 27 kids who tried to force him into the showers, suggested that when I went to Game 4, I should bring a movie camera and we could watch highlights -- instead of gym. The social studies teacher, Mrs. Rice, outdid them all. She moved my chair up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of it into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half-inning -- and in those days you could cram a lot of half-innings into your average seventh grade social studies class, not just one -- I'd add a digit to the line score:

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Jason Christiansen should have had absolutely no role in the 2002 World Series. Trying to recover from career-threatening elbow surgery, the San Francisco Giants' relief pitcher was literally going to just sit there in the dugout, a spectator with the best seat in the house, wearing a Giants uniform that would never get dirty and never get noticed. But then came the intervention of the vast floating cloud of mean-spiritedness that trails the sport of baseball the way the swirling dust used to follow the Peanuts character Pigpen.

Sitting in non-playing anonymity, Christiansen thought he might still serve some good purpose. He would write two letters and two numbers on the back of his cap -- "DK 57" -- and make it seem like his dear friend, the late Cardinals' pitcher Darryl Kile, was there with him.

For this, baseball's executives threatened to revoke Christiansen's rights to wear that uniform and sit in that dugout. In one of those mindless, maddening executive moments that baseball can seemingly summon at will and produce in infinite numbers, commissioner Bud Selig's top two hatchetmen, Sandy Alderson and Bob Watson, confronted Christiansen while the World Series was still in Anaheim and told him his tribute to Kile violated a baseball rule that mandates that all uniforms must look the same.

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Nearly two months earlier, the man who had hired him, Bing Devine, had been ousted as the Cardinals' general manager in a palace coup that constituted perhaps the blackest marks in the long careers of future Hall of Famers Branch Rickey and Leo Durocher. The fifth-place Cardinals were stumbling ever further out of the pennant race, his boss and best friend had just been given the bum's rush, and nobody in the team hierarchy had even mentioned a chance that Keane might be rehired for 1965.

So as large chunks of the first-place Philadelphia Phillies collapsed around him, Keane and his Cards grimly plodded onward -- and won the pennant. It was around then that owner Gussie Busch called him in to talk about an extension, negotiations Keane asked to delay until after the World Series. Only he knew what he had planned.

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His recalcitrant manager, a lifetime employee who had rocketed from backup outfielder for the Yankees farm team in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to the skipper at Yankee Stadium in just under 15 years, had fenced with The Boss once too often. After weeks of traded barbs worthy of the schoolyard -- "I'm not coming back"; "I didn't say you could come back" -- Steinbrenner had settled it: He'd hired Showalter's replacement, Joe Torre.

And New York howled with laughter.

Revisionist history has Steinbrenner making the most adept move of his extraordinarily varied three decades as Yankees owner, welcoming back into the city's bosom the Brooklyn boy who had gone off to star in Milwaukee and St. Louis, and who had earned respect if not championships as the manager of the Mets and Cardinals. In fact, Torre's hiring was greeted with the kind of disbelief and contempt last seen when the Yankees had selected as manager one of the game's greatest clowns, Casey Stengel, in 1949. The idea that Torre The Failed could succeed Buck, the man who had brought the Yankees back to the postseason for the first time in 14 seasons, seemed to confirm Steinbrenner's return to lunacy.

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At the time, the obvious joke was that Gore had encountered either the two dumbest airport screeners in the country, or ones so paranoid that they had concluded that because the former vice president had lost the presidential election to George Bush, Gore had gone over to al-Qaida.

Now, however, in the light of something called AVOT, we can revise that joke. Gore might have been pulled out of the boarding lines not because of the risk he posed by having lost to Bush, but rather because of the risk he posed by having opposed him.

AVOT is the most recent acronym selected by the most recent group of Americans who have anointed themselves responsible for deciding what kind of freedoms we should have in this country, and who gets their approval to have them. Where were you, and what were you doing, when you first heard these great hits of yesteryear: HUAC; McCarthy Committee; Alien and Sedition Acts; Truman Loyalty Oath; Woodrow Wilson Plays "Stop That Newspaper"?

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A) Unencumbered by security guards, fans ran out of the stands to attack a member of one of the teams.

B) One club was accused of having as many as seven marijuana smokers on its roster.

C) An American team moved toward a complicated agreement that will bring Japan's top player to the U.S. for two to four seasons, then send him back home.

The correct answer to both questions is C. Yet the media's continuing amazement in the face of the obvious and the repetitive -- especially in sports -- turned items A and B into unprecedented, unpredictable acts.

Tom Gamboa is the first-base coach of the Kansas City Royals who got poleaxed by the new poster boys for father-and-son togetherness at the old ball yard. While the attack on him was vicious, unjustifiable and resoundingly self-defeating on the part of the attackers, and while it has also resulted in what is at least temporary hearing loss for the victim, it is anything but an unusual occurrence at a major league baseball game.

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The same alarm that drove the Georgia woman to warn authorities about a terror plot she thought she overheard at a Shoney's restaurant on Friday caused me to come within moments of getting Yankee Stadium evacuated last October. Eunice Stone might very well have been a hero.

It's absolutely possible that three terrorists could've stopped off at a waffle house in Calhoun, Ga. Three men with Middle Eastern accents might well have begun a loud and elaborate conversation wondering what, if Americans were "mourning on 9/11," they'd be doing on 9/13. Three men wearing Middle Eastern headgear could have asked each other whether they "had enough" to "bring it down."

There was just one logical bar that had not been cleared, one question that Stone might've pursued before she phoned her local sheriff -- or that authorities might've pursued afterward, before they shut down part of South Florida's primary west-east artery for 17 hours.

Here's that one tough rational hurdle: This public conspiratorial conversation these malefactors had within earshot of Eunice Stone at the Shoney's restaurant in Calhoun -- they conducted it in English?

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Throughout the morning, a gusty, swirling wind had already evoked emotions and remembrance throughout New York City in a way words could not. It was impossible to see the eddies of dust and trash at every intersection, to fend off dirt blown forcefully into the eyes and mouth, without imparting to them some intent. It was as if visceral reminders were being provided to confirm the ones of emotion and intellect.

And then the wind turned entirely unsentimental.

Early Wednesday afternoon in Columbus Circle, at the southeast corner of Central Park, the winds, produced by Hurricane Gustav, reached speeds in excess of 45 miles an hour and cut through the largest construction site in the city. A large piece of plywood blew off an upper floor of what will become the new headquarters of AOL Time Warner. It struck the head of a 36-year-old carpenter who was eating his lunch while sitting on a sidewalk. He required surgery for serious head trauma. Two passersby were slightly hurt.

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Not me. Not those guys who suddenly disappear from your local TV newscast. Not the shock jocks "Opie & Anthony."

You've heard their story by now. These were the foofs on WNEW-FM in New York who encouraged a couple to get way too affectionate in the middle of St. Patrick's Cathedral. They spawned understandable outrage, muted cries about freedom of speech, and endless bad jokes about how they were usurping the privileges of priests.

But most of all, they tripped off a series of news reports about how they'd been "fired." Only down toward the end of these stories -- if even there -- was a brief mention about how their employers, Infinity Broadcasting, would try to reach a financial settlement regarding the remaining year of their contract, worth somewhere around $10 million.

Some firing, huh?

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An authoritative source in contact with the negotiators reported "this thing is moving along," and added there was a reasonable chance the two sides would reach a tentative deal before the strike deadline. "The owners can now claim that they clearly got something," the source added. "I don't think there's going to be games lost."

With negotiators for both sides virtually silent as they shuttled in and out of at least five separate brief meetings in New York Wednesday -- the last one not starting until nearly midnight Eastern time -- official news of shifts in bargaining positions was not forthcoming. Multiple sources confirmed, however, that Tuesday night and again Wednesday, the union moved significantly closer to the owners' position on the payroll threshold for the so-called luxury tax. The owners had been seeking a $107 million level per team, after which payroll would be penalized by as much as 50 percent. The players had moved to $125 million last week, but were said by these sources to have now moved closer to $120 million.

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"The owners are playing nuclear chicken again," said a source in direct contact with negotiators on both sides. He said that while the Players Association had again moved closer to the owners' position on the crucial outstanding issue, the luxury tax threshold, several owners, and even some management negotiators, had taken a hard line, intimating they doubted the players would actually strike before Friday's games.

The union, breaking its own precedent, planned to remain at the talks right up to the deadline, even if a strike seemed inevitable. In the past, it had broken off negotiations by 9 p.m. EDT so that its membership would not have to prepare to travel for the following day's games. This same source said of union negotiators "they're planning on staying all night."

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Based on as many off-the-record temperature-takings as could be managed, which produced some hints, some deductions and an awful lot of confirmations, this is a road map of the likely events of the next two weeks, the crunchiest of crunch times in the baseball labor war.

I'm putting these pieces together early on the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 27, and many elements of this timeline could be delayed, hastened or knocked down by unforeseen events. But one critical source who has been a back-channel in the last four major baseball impasses says what follows matches his own expectations, if not precisely, then generally.

And the only unforeseen events either of us can guess at, even in a science-fiction sort of way, are: A) a bewildering outbreak of common sense; and B) an unreported, massive owners' strike slush fund that would inoculate them against a seasonal shutdown that the leading sports analyst at Lehman Brothers calculates would cost them $1.2 billion before the end of this October, and $5 billion by the end of October 2003.

What You Don't Know About What's Already Happened: It's clear that contrary to expectations, the hawks are not in complete control of management's side of bargaining.

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In sports bars, on athletic fields, next to radios, in front of televisions blocking all channels except Fox News, they are ready for the day they know will come: confirmation of The Conspiracy.

Fortunately The Conspiracy is like one of those fill-in-the-blank short-story books. The content can change, the origin can change, the malefactors can change. But always remaining the same, especially in the worlds of sports and politics, is the understanding that whenever you've been defeated, whatever hasn't gone your way -- it's The Conspiracy's fault.

I must confess that I'm such a non-conspiracy theorist that I had a dream once in which President Kennedy came to see me to explain that, yes, he had been shot both from the front and the back, but, no, it wasn't a conspiracy. As my imaginary JFK perfectly analogized, it was like those occasions when two sets of bank robbers show up at the same branch at the same hour. The more inviting, and more poorly protected, the target, the more likely it is that more than one person or group will try to attack it. It's been four years since that dream, and I still can't shake the idea that coincidence is the only theory that is not fatally contradicted by at least one of the known facts of Nov. 22, 1963.

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