If the NL manager of the year vote just goes to the skipper whose team had the best regular-season record (Cubs), then why the drama? Why wait until the middle of football season to tell us?

The word ''joke'' comes to mind again and again in this, the 101st year of lovable losing. Aren't the Cubs a knee-slapper? Thanks for continuing the humor, MLB.

?Why would a man in his late 50s go deer hunting for the first time?

Give me a second to ask myself, and I'll have your answer.

OK, I went because a friend asked me and my son to go -- in northern Minnesota -- along with a bunch of other hunters and their sons, staying in an A-frame on the friend's wooded land where we would be hunting.

I went because I have shot rifles and handguns before, though I'm not nuts about weapons of any kind, and because deer hunting is an American fall tradition that cannot be written off as the province of hillbillies, half-wits, sadists and the right-wing spawn of Charlton Heston and Dick Cheney.

I went because deer are reproducing everywhere, virtually without predators, and because I have seen them in city parking lots, neighbors' gardens, and coming straight at my headlights. Indeed,

I have hit three deer and killed two with my car, and the damage they did to my machinery was fairly amazing.

Perhaps most of all, I went because of a sense of the order of this world and the knowledge that life isn't kind, gentle or fair, that there will always be winners and losers. If you've ever eaten a hamburger or chicken wing, please don't preach. That you distance yourself from the food-production process makes no difference.

Having said that, the weaponry scared me. To sit alone in a tree stand in a cold, windy forest with a 30.06 across your lap, three bullets the size of laundry pens locked in the clip, is to ask yourself why you need a gun at all.

But this nation was born of men with rifles, and deep within the deer-hunting ritual is the essence of that rebellious and risky and dangerous independence. Yes, authorities could ''harvest'' deer like they harvest grain -- by the way, do you know how many deer die of starvation, freezing, disease and car collisions each year? -- but if we get separated much more from the primitive things we must do, we'll be more like computers than humans.

I didn't shoot a deer, didn't even fire my rifle. And that's fine. I paid $141 for a license, and the money goes toward wildlife management.

The members of the group shot five deer over the weekend. My son got one, a buck, with a great shot, while stalking. Every bit of the deer meat will be eaten -- by the hunters or hungry people eligible for Minnesota's venison donation plan.

The best part was the conversation once we all were back in the cabin seated around the fire -- about guns, animals, funny stuff, economics, life. We were guys, no apologies. Women would have been welcome, I suppose. But there were none.

I don't know if I'll go back next season. But I think I will.

?Barry Melrose was fired after 16 games as the head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning. Out of the game for 13 years, Melrose had been the ESPN talker with the greasy Hockey hair who had an opinion on everything that happened on ice.

He followed the Blackhawks' Denis Savard, becoming the second coach to get canned early in this NHL season.

Melrose's firing leaves me with two eternal questions: Does it ever look harder from the TV booth than it does from the bench?

And who are the dunces who hire these coaches in the first place?

?We all know wide receivers are prima donnas. But who would have guessed they ever could stick together like, well, teammates?

I'm writing this before Florida State's homecoming game in Tallahassee against Boston College, but just know that five Seminoles wide receivers were suspended by coach Bobby Bowden for their involvement in a campus fight with other students Wednesday afternoon.

Five wide receivers!

No other players.

Not sure how much damage occurred, but a female bystander was apparently hit in the face with a chair and received minor injuries in the fracas.

Forget that for a moment. Who has ever seen even two wide receivers in the company of one another? Five? That's like finding a box of hugging weasels.

And they were all fighting together? Crazy.

So, sorry about the passing game, Coach B.

But you have to love your fancy boys' teamwork.

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