Remember the NHL? Brad Richards and the players hope you do. Dave Sandford/Getty Images

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3. Every day that passes, the NHL season looks more unlikely? Is this sad or is the joke that so many people have been making of hockey?

Well, it's sad. Even the joke part is sad, because the players don't seem to get it. They don't seem to understand what a disposable part of the sports landscape they've become. Imagine a group of track and field athletes getting involved in a job action. The public wouldn't realize they were gone until the Olympic Games, and maybe not even then. It's only marginally different for the NHL.

Although I don't cover the NHL, this hits reasonably close to home for me, because I have a 13-year-old son who plays youth travel hockey and has played since he was 6 years old. Kid lives for the game. I'll say this: He doesn't often ask about the NHL, and neither do his hockey buddies. That should terrify the league. However, in past years, he has watched games after his homework was done and was locked in for as much of the Stanley Cup playoffs as possible. Thousands of kids in the U.S. play youth hockey, which doesn't make it a major sport or soccer would have displaced the NFL two decades ago.

But if the NHL just fades silently into niche-sportdom, with only a few games a year available on TV, hockey will become soccer. The kids who could form -- and perhaps grow -- their viewership base will get used to having no games on TV (like soccer), and stop caring. Hockey's entire mainstream future is at stake here, nothing less.

4. Tiger finally gets a W. About time, huh?

Tiger's slump was the best thing for golf -- and maybe even for him, although I'm sure it hasn't been fun. At the peak of his powers, he was a default winner. Now he's human. Now it's a bigger deal when he wins. Now if he breaks Jack Nicklaus' record for wins in majors, it won't feel like a foregone conclusion. All good.

5. What do sportswriters do on their days off?

Well, on my day off Tuesday, I gave a talk to a class of students at Middlebury College, a terrific school in central Vermont. Middlebury is an idyllic place where I played when I was a student and mediocre athlete at Williams College and where I covered games early in my newspaper days. It was a pleasure to go back. It was more of a pleasure to meet and talk with the 30-some students in the class, almost all of them athletes.

It is largely presumed by advertisers and marketing gurus that the 18-29 demo has little interest in the more pressing issues in sport -- Division I hypocrisy, steroids, etc. -- and rather would watch the X-Games while drinking Red Bull-and-vodkas. I have no doubt that most of the students I met at Middlebury would have plenty of fun doing the latter, but they also impressed me with their genuine (or well-acted) interest in more cerebral athletic issues. And they read SI. All good, too.