I went back to the Tribune Tower Sunday morning, for the first time since being axed.

I had been invited to be a guest of Rick Kogan’s on his weekly WGN radio show, “Sunday Papers” and he asked me to come to the studio, which is inside the Tower.

My husband Rick came with me because it was Father’s Day and what man doesn’t want to wake up at 6 a.m. on the Sunday of Father’s Day and drive his wife downtown?

As we were walking in, I remarked how stupid it was that I hadn’t remembered to bring in my Tribune-issue laptop and cell phone, since they had to be returned. But Rick told me he had already returned them for me, several weeks before.

I had absolutely no idea, which may give you some indication of how tight a rein I keep on my very important to-do list and valuable equipment that doesn’t belong to me. My husband obviously knew I could not bear the thought of stepping foot in the place, so much so that he quietly just did it for me, meeting someone from the sports department in the lobby to hand over the stuff.

So kind a gesture was it, that if it had been Mother’s Day rather than Father’s Day, this would have sufficed as a present.

I have written about this lobby before. I had never been one to necessarily buy into the arrogant notion that everything attached to the great Tribune edifice was sacred and even if I did then, I think it’s pretty safe to say I don’t now.

But the building is well, I can’t help it, it’s just special. Even if I hadn’t worked there, I would have taken my children there to see the fragments stuck into the outside of the building from such historically significant places as the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall and Abraham Lincoln’s original tomb.

But inside is where I stood agape the first time I ventured in as a college student, saw the famous quotations describing the ideals of a free press etched into the walls, and grew dizzy as I spun around and around to read each one.

The Hall of Inscriptions, it’s called.  

I read them over and over. I might have even tried to memorize them. And I felt important, like I was a part of this scared trust, even as a kid just starting out.

Where there is a free press, the governors must live in constant awe of the opinions of the governed.Lord Macaulay

Again and again as I walked through the lobby over the years, I would read that quote and the others. It’s hard not to as they loom over you. And like most sportswriters, I wasn’t in the building all that much over the years, which only heightened the experience when I walked through the front doors.

But strangely, I never became all that comfortable there, like it was my building, my place. I felt lucky that I got to work there, but also intimidated by the surroundings as if I was never dressed quite well enough or that one day someone might tap me on the shoulder and test me on the quotations. Like Col. McCormick himself was looking down and might swat me away at any given moment.

Newspapers are the sentinels of the liberties of our country.  Benjamin Rush

I still have my employee ID in my wallet, for some reason. I had it there Sunday, when I signed in as a visitor. I realized afterward that I never looked up while I was there, even while waiting for Rick Kogan’s producer to come out and bring us into the studio.

Maybe I didn’t want to get those familiar goose bumps. Maybe I didn’t want to know what it was like not to feel lucky I got to work there.

But here’s the funny part. I wasn’t intimidated. I was wearing shorts, a t-shirt, had bad hair and I felt OK, familiar, kind of like this was my place. I know every inch of that lobby.  I know all the secret back ways up to the newsroom. How many times did I bring my kids up those elevators to the fourth floor, where Wendell buzzed them in and they knew where my mailbox was and where to go to visit Rose, our former sports department secretary, and to see Holly’s Pez dispenser collection?

I’m glad I went.

I’ll probably never go back.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. Flannery O’Connor/files/0/9/0/8/7/188681-178090/isaacson.mp3″>The Sunday Papers with Rick Kogan – 06/21/09

I think of many things on Father’s Day.

I think of omelets because my dad was great at making them. If my mother ever asked him to, say, bake a potato, I’m sure he would have panicked. But he made beautiful omelets. Fluffy and perfect with whatever you could dream of to go inside, providing we had it in the refrigerator.

My dad was big on breakfast. All of us would sit queasy and silent on dark winter mornings, waiting for the obscenely early school bus while he ladled heaping bowls of steaming cream of wheat before us, pretending he didn’t hear the gagging sounds that followed and insisting we eat.

I think about how he worried. And if any world event had any remote chance of adversely affecting his family, he worried more. If there was a recall, the item must be destroyed. “But dad, our babyseat is a different brand than is being recalled. And it’s only being recalled in India.”

Things did not always make sense where it concerned my dad.

I think about how he loved sports, worshipped the Bears, admired pro golf, enjoyed baseball, liked to swim, even coached Little League. But he couldn’t play a game of catch without breaking his glasses. 

I think of how he seemed strong and unafraid but could cry at a particularly tender episode of “Little House on the Prairie.”

“You’re crying?” my mom would say.

“Jack the dog died,” my father would explain, wiping his eyes.

He was smart but sure you caught pneumonia from wet hair.

He was stubborn and had a temper, but hated for anyone to stay mad at him and was the most affectionate man I ever knew.

He could also soothe any crying baby handed to him. Didn’t have to know the baby, baby didn’t have to know him, but once in his arms that baby would stop crying, look deep into my father’s eyes and fall asleep within a minute. Every time.

My dad loved a good bowl of soup, had to be mad hot; a good hot dog with mustard and onion (“even though it doesn’t like me,” he would lament);  vanilla milkshakes and vanilla ice cream, even at “31 Flavors.”

“Again with the vanilla?” my mother would say. “It’s french vanilla,” my dad would reply, mushing it into soup. 

He wore the same style slippers and pajamas, and went to the same barber shop, drug store, dry cleaners and bank for close to 50 years – and at the exact same time each week. He lived on Maalox (see hot dog reference) and never had a good night’s sleep in his life.

“So how come I could hear you snoring?” my mom would say.

We teased him that he had no sense of humor, but he knew how to laugh and how to take a joke.

He never actually fixed anything that I’m aware of, but he loved his tools.

He couldn’t change the oil in his car but he loved his garage and nobody ‘s was cleaner (painted the floor of the garage, too, though no one could figure out why). He couldn’t barbecue either, but loved his lawn and his flower and vegetable gardens.

He was far from a neat freak but once every month or so, also for reasons unknown, he used an industrial buffer on the linoleum.

He could be tight with the buck but he was generous to a fault.

He would go anywhere, at any time and any distance for his children, including driving eight hours to pick me up from college and take me home, two round trips in one weekend, because I was homesick.

He was loyal and honest and adored his family. And no one will ever worry about us like he did.

He was a good father.

And I still can’t ruin an omelet without missing him terribly.

I recently made the point in this space that among my many talents, commemorating special occasions with thoughtful prose on greeting cards is not one of them.

Ironic, I know, especially because as a child, I thought that working for Hallmark would be a wonderful way to make a living since my mother always cried whenever she read my cards to her. Now, however, I know that mothers can cry over any number of things their children do, including scratching themselves in the school play.

I’m the one who usually goes for the Peanuts card that reads: “Happiness is a kiss on the nose . . .” or the one with the purple lilacs that says “Our love for you will not abate, for all eternity I will wait . . .”

I mean, how can you beat that?

Underneath, I’ll scrawl my feeble thanks to my husband for being such a wonderful father to our children, that I could not hope for one any better.

I rationalize that there really are no words to adequately capture feelings like these on the inside of a greeting card anyway.

I mean, how do you thank a person for flying across the country with your very small children to meet you at NBA Finals and Super Bowls he would never come close to actually seeing,  just so you would not have to be away from them for too long?

I remember at least one of those trips taken in the middle of potty training. And by “in the middle,” I mean it was not yet completed even though like many parents, I imagine, we made the mistake of thinking that if we wished for it hard enough and bribed the child long enough, somehow it would magically just happen.

I remember the hotel room in which the training failed, and I remember walking in just seconds after the clean-up to find only a sheepish grin on both daddy and child.

I know that mothers possess many great qualities but that fathers, or at least my children’s father, is the parent with the patience to sit through 613 straight episodes of “Sponge Bob” or worse, when it’s the only thing that makes a sick child happy.

If only fatherhood could be summed up on a greeting card or captured in a highlight reel. Rather it’s a million moments spread out over a lifetime. It’s the hockey games in the basement with pillows tied to your shins; amusement parks constructed of K’Nex and condominiums from Legos . It’s the weekend mornings spent coloring at the kitchen table and keeping beauty shop appointments where your toenails are painted pink, your hair combed against the grain and little hands tickled rather than massaged.  

It’s resisting the urge to protest the first time your son doesn’t want to kiss you in front of his friends, and biting back tears the first time a boy likes your baby girl and she likes him back. It’s preferring to be home with your kids over any golf course in the world, and never calling it “babysitting.”

It’s knowing every teacher’s name and after-school activity and carpool schedule and lunch preference without having to ask, and being able to remind your wife whenever necessary.

Once, when our daughter was four and Rick had to leave town for one night on his first-ever business trip, he was nearly out the door when Amanda ran to him and wrapped herself around his legs.

“Daddy,” she cried in desperation, “does mommy know what to do?”

He always did.

Still does.

And I’m thinking that might make a nice Father’s Day card.Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.

White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko is a soft-spoken, thoughtful man. So much so, that when he makes a point as he did on Wednesday in the cramped quarters of the visitors clubhouse at Wrigley Field, you can almost miss it if you’re not paying close enough attention.
 

It was the kind of statement generally accompanied by a pointed finger or a raised voice. But when Konerko brought it up before the White Sox defeated the Cubs in the first game of their rain-shortened series, he did it in his typical quiet fashion. But his words packed quite a punch.
 

Konerko was asked if the New York Times’ report that Sammy Sosa tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003, suddenly makes players such as his former teammate Frank Thomas, look like a stronger Hall of Fame candidate.
 

Thomas, one of the top sluggers in the game, was dwarfed in comparison to the seasonal home run numbers later put up by Sosa, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. But Thomas’ body never changed dramatically in proportion like the others, and his numbers elicited admiration but never suspicion.
 

One would have expected Konerko, who has also developed a reputation as a “clean” home run hitter during his career, to issue an impassioned statement in support of players like Thomas. Instead, he chose to address those who created and carried the message to him.
 

“Unfortunately, today it’s just not a story for me,” Konerko told reporters. “Some guy writes an article, the sources aren’t public. One of two things needs to happen for me. . . . Sources need to put their names behind it and put [their] faces out there and tell people who [they] are. Or Sammy admits to it . . . .
 

“That’s the only two ways this becomes a story. I know, obviously if you guys are standing here, it’s a story. But I just think it’s sad that it has come to the point that news comes out of reports of unnamed sources. It gives a bad name for you guys . . . It’s not very American.”
 

Clearly, Konerko, who rarely ducks a question, put some thought into his response and was genuinely disturbed with the way the steroid reports have leaked out through unnamed sources. We all should be disturbed on some level.

But he’s picking the wrong time for the wrong argument.

It isn’t just that a reputable news organization “broke” the story, though that’s a good place to start.  Because there are so many disreputable outlets of information, it is understandable that everyone gets lumped in together. Also, the New York Times is certainly not infallible (they may never fully recover the credibility lost over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003).

There was a time when newspapers almost never printed stories with unnamed sources unless it carried national security concerns like Watergate did when the Washington Post broke perhaps the story of the century. Certainly sportswriters were never allowed to cite unnamed sources, a practice used with regularity now for the most mundane stories.

But when a newspaper like the Times prints a report with unnamed sources, that does not mean that they do not know the source or that the source is not credible. In fact, the veracity of the source in all likelihood passed stricter standards because it was not identified.

If Konerko doesn’t know this, he probably should by now — if only because this is a story that a player of his stature should comment on, rather than come across as if he is defending Sosa.

By taking one of the most important Chicago “sports” stories in years and turning it into a debate on whether it passes the credible journalism test, Konerko, for all of his sincerity, is deflecting attention from the real issue.

And while he is surely allowed his opinion, this was simply a poor time and the wrong place to inject it. Read Melissa’s column on Crosstown Classic on ESPNChicago.com.

They never banked on getting caught.  

Never thought we’d all learn to spot the bad guys among the real ballplayers. That we would not see athletes who had become stronger but men who looked like teenaged acne sufferers, freaks with block heads and raging tempers and bloated statistics that did not make sense.

They thought that we were stupid and they were smart and that they would never get caught, as all cheaters do.

And now, what? We’re taking polls to see who will still vote Sammy Sosa into the Hall of Fame?

No. No. And again, no.

No matter his numbers or his raw skill or the magnitude of his career. No matter if he ever admits his sins, but especially because he has not.

We did not do this to Sammy Sosa.

Sosa, revealed in a New York Times report Tuesday to have tested positive in 2003 for performance-enhancing drugs, did this. And no one expressed surprise because as one name fell, and then another and then another, we became experts at detecting cheaters.

All we needed was the proof, and we have it now from a list of 104 players who failed urine tests six years ago that was supposed to determine whether drug-testing would be necessary. Well, it was. And now the “anonymous” list is leaking out one drip at a time.

It stinks for baseball, of course. For all the players who did not cheat and whose careers, like Frank Thomas’ and Harold Baines’, never drew the admiration and honor they should have. When Sosa and Mark McGwire were putting up their insane home run numbers in 1998, we actually bought into it and worse, lauded them for bringing fans back to baseball.

Shame on them

Shame on those of us who are talking about still considering them for baseball’s greatest honor; those of us who have suggested creating a special wing for cheaters in the Hall of Fame.

Could there be a stupider idea? Create a special place in the most sacred temple of the sport for those who have disgraced it the most?

Why do we put athletes into their sports’ Halls of Fame? To make sure they are never forgotten, that they are forever memorialized .

The cheaters do not deserve to be memorialized.

And there isn’t a chance we will ever forget them.

It does not matter if we blew it on bad guys decades ago. We’re smarter now. Smart enough to know all about performance-enhancing drugs. Smart enough to find out who is using them.

Too smart to blow it again. Read Melissa on ESPNChicago.com.