I've got all of my teeth, my hair is short, and I don't say "eh." I don't skate too well and I haven't been in a fight since fifth grade. I've only seen Mighty Ducks four times. And despite all of that, there is a hockey player inside of me just waiting to burst out and finally figure out which channel is Versus. Hockey is back, baby! I might be a little late to the train, but there are now certainly four major sports on the American landscape. Memo to soccer and NASCAR: you had your chance and you blew it.

If you think baseball is a boring three-plus-hour game where fat steroid-users parade around with big muscles, big heads, and "bacne," you're right. And you're missing the point. Sure, the games are long and the pants are tight. The muscles may be more artificial than the hot dog meat and the grass not as green as the players' bank accounts. The fans may be more interested in perfecting The Wave and the tickets might cost more than a 50 percent share in GM. But it's baseball, and it's back.

A regular season NESCAC championship? Yawn. A league title? Yes ma'am. The NCAA tournament for the 10th straight year? You bet. One of the top 25 teams in the country? Check. If I don't have your attention yet, I'm sorry to disappoint, but you've stumbled on the Orient's sports column. There's not much else the Bowdoin Women's Basketball Team can do. March: the month of mud, spring break and basketball. But in Brunswick, the Madness of March is over and we're left with just the mud and the all-too-distant-and-hazy memories of vacations in the sun. Sure, "The Tourney" still rages on around the country. Brackets are still poised to be made or busted and that company pool prize still seems within reach.

I can't tell you that I solved their problems. I don't think that I changed their lives. I'm not even sure that they'd remember me now. I'm positive that I didn't cure AIDS. I'll tell you what though: for an hour every week those kids forgot about their lives. They forgot about the smell of the power plant, of the trash, of the mud. They forgot about walking home in big groups with heads bowed in an effort to draw as little attention as possible. They forgot about their mother, their father, their cousin, who had died of AIDS.

Say what you want about sports, but they'll come through for you when you need them the most. You can say it's just a game and you can shake your head at the die-hards in the facepaint and the full costume and without a shirt. You can disapprove of the billion-dollar stadiums and the tax-breaks and the miserly owners. You can even hate fantasy drafts, playoff beards and rally-caps. You just don't get it.

In less than a month I'll celebrate my 22nd birthday on the streets of Boston, probably all-too-literally, with some friends. I don't know what Matt Forte will be up to next week when he turns 22, but I'm fairly sure that it'll be cooler than heading to the Brookline Applebee's with two guy friends who will each eat their own appetizer sampler.

We may have just finished an exhausting election season, but now it's time to ramp up football season. The Tennessee Titans are a surprising dark horse if I've ever seen one. The infamous and annoyingly undefeated '72 Dolphins squad must have thought that they could break out the champagne early this year while watching Tom Brady writhe in pain on the Gillette Stadium greenway. But heading into Week 11, the Titans are a smooth 9-0 to lead the league.

I'm not much of a crier, but the tears certainly have been flowing lately. There comes a time in every athlete's life when he (or she, because admittedly 99 percent of the female athletes at this school are more athletic than me and could beat me in a fight) realizes that it's over and that his life will never, ever be the same again.

If it was unclear to you before, TBS and Fox have most certainly reminded you by now that there is only one October. And thank God. Don't get me wrong, I love all that goes on in the sports world in October, but if November or December fought October for sports supremacy, I'd be flunking out of school even faster than I already am (Sorry Mom.)

One was named the greatest football player to ever play at Purdue and is one of the faces of its athletics program. The other faces a sentence of life imprisonment for the second time and is currently in the midst of his second criminal trial. One has dedicated his post-football career to keeping kids in school; the other has not been out of the tabloids. One has his bust in South Bend, Indiana as a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. The other has been enshrined in Canton, Ohio, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame game. One had 14 touchdowns in the 1968 season, the other made the end zone 21 times.

The Mafia assassinated Kennedy. I've seen Bigfoot myself on three separate occasions. And I'm positive Tom Brady will be on the field this Sunday for his 129th consecutive start at quarterback for the New England Patriots. At this point, I'm close to hysterics, and I'll believe anything but the truth. Come Sunday, there is no way Matt Cassel will be under center for his first meaningful start since high school. I've convinced myself that Barry Bonds is innocent and Marion Jones is a saint. I know for a fact that Rosie Ruiz is just really fast.