Yes, I am still browsing through the same issue of Sports Illustrated.  Sorry, but it has to wait until my People Magazine is completely consumed first and that can easily take a good 10, 12 minutes.

So I’m reading and I laugh — that sarcastic, self-righteous laugh — because I see a story about a 16-year-old baseball player from Las Vegas.

I am not laughing that self-righteous laugh because Sports Illustrated and Tom Verducci, a gifted writer l once worked with for one day on the staff of Today newspaper, chose to write the story on the fabulously gifted Bryce Harper.

Verducci, who was already on his way to sportswriting greatness when he graciously shared his going-away cake with me on his way out of Cocoa, Florida in 1983 en route to New York Newsday, and recently wrote The Yankee Years with Joe Torre, knows a great story like he knows a great baseball player. And this kid is clearly both.

But I laugh because I know that at precisely the same time I am reading the story, at least a couple thousand crazy parents of semi-talented eight-year-olds are also reading and envisioning similar scenarios for their kids.

I know this because I live in a place – it’s called America, maybe you’ve heard of it – where in the absence of more serious concerns in life or sometimes despite more serious concerns in life – there is a serious break from reality when it comes to children and sports.

Now granted when our 11-year-old son Alec won his baseball playoff game the other day, I found myself thrusting my fist so hard that my husband gave me a look that suggested I was one step away from becoming the kind of troubled parent I have read about in People Magazine.

Also, I will admit that when we found out last night that Alec made the travel soccer team again this year, thus granting us the privilege of writing out a check for $850, not including travel and uniform expenses, I was a little too relieved.

I am told that the $1,100 total is inexpensive compared to other suburbs and other sports but I don’t need to be told. And let’s not even discuss a sport like hockey.

I am now trying to picture my father paying over a thousand bucks for us to play sports, or even the $150 we pay for Alec to play house league baseball, and this makes me laugh as well.

But once again, I stray.

Recently, I watched as the father of a 10-year-old pitcher on an opposing team yelled for his son not to give the hitter “anything good,” and to pitch it “low and inside.”

Mind you, it’s a good night when Chicago White Sox pitcher Bartolo Colon can keep a pitch low and inside, and that the father yelled this with a straight face and a serious tone, and you will appreciate the hilarity of the moment. At least for me, anyway.

I also love the dad who’s as tall as he is wide, taking his seven-year-old’s dominance in pee-wee basketball as a sure sign that he’s headed to Duke.

When Bryce Harper was nine, Verducci tells us, he was recruited to play for travel teams all over the country who offered to pay his plane fare , hotel expenses and meals. He would go, sometimes alone when his parents could not accompany him, and for the past seven years he has played between 80 and 130 baseball games annually.

For the elite children athletes in this country, this is standard procedure and for kids like Bryce Harper, it helped him flourish. Harper, whom they call “the LeBron James of baseball,” has hit the longest home run in the history of Tropicana Stadium, the home park of the Tampa Bay Rays. But take it down a notch, to the kids who  merely play 50 or 60 games a year, drive to the next state instead of flying cross-country and hit baseballs 200 feet as opposed to 500, and the odds of them getting any closer to Sports Illustrated than standing next to a newsstand, are infinitesimal.

Take it down a level further to the kids who play in the games I watch, and they would have a greater chance of getting hit by a meteor shortly after winning the lottery.

But I also know that SI article is pinned up in some kids’ bedrooms tonight. And worse, on some parents’ refrigerators.

Great story in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated about college football players who discover after their playing careers are over, that they are seriously overweight.

Most people would go right to the cover story on the Stanley Cup. Or the NBA Finals. Or even the feature on the 16-year-old baseball player they’re calling “Baseball’s LeBron” (more on that tomorrow). Me, I go right to the story about the fat kids.

I’m not being insensitive calling them “fat kids.” As one of them, Jeff Kendall, a 300-pound-plus lineman from the University of Oregon, said in the article: “All of a sudden you go from being a fat kid living the dream to, well, just fat.”

It was an interesting story, highlighting the fact that less than three percent of college players go onto play professional football while many of the rest are left to wonder what’s next. And for the guys whose bodies just need a break after years of lifting weights and working out and eating whatever they want, the 300-pound-plus lineman become 400-pound health risks.

And what lasting and meaningful impression was I left with after I finished reading, you ask?

How annoyingly unfair it is that men have such an easier time losing weight.

Granted, one former player, Nebraska center Brett Byford, had age on his side when he dropped 75 pounds in three months. I think if you read with a highly powered magnifying glass, you’d see underneath his “After” photo: “Results are not typical.”

And indeed, his diet plan was a bit unconventional: one meal a day for the first week, followed by two days of fasting.  

But that’s how men do it, no matter what age they are.

My husband skips his nightly bowl of ice cream for a week and he loses five pounds.

And how about the guys on my favorite show, “Biggest Loser,” who routinely drop 30 pounds in a week (If you’ve watched the show, you know I’m not exaggerating). On one episode, one poor woman contestant, after spending just as much time on the treadmill while pretending that a two-ounce container of diet pudding was satisfying her sweet tooth, actually gained weight. The trainer’s explanation? That stress contributed to her weight gain.

I’m not saying men don’t have their own problems. They get stressed, their cholesterol goes up and their hair falls out.  As much as we women can tolerate – childbirth and the communal dressing room at Loehmann’s springs immediately to mind – I don’t think most of us would handle baldness as well as our male counterparts.

But in the world of dieting, men have a distinctly unfair advantage.

I’m sure there are very sound physiological reasons that I could Google if I really cared about backing up my opinions with fact (this should also look good on my next employee background check). But I prefer to chalk it up to the gods.

 I chalk a lot up to the gods when it’s convenient.  For instance, when I was on my way home last week from two really encouraging and fruitful meetings concerning future employment only to field a phone call from a mean New York literary agent who told me that NO ONE would buy my latest book idea, I immediately determined two things. One was that of all the correspondence I’ve had with New Yorkers in my lifetime, at least 95 percent has been unpleasant. And two, that it was the gods telling me not to get too comfortable or too cocky.

And so it is that the gods are also responsible for men losing weight easier. The gods like it that most men don’t really care that much how they look. If I told my husband he could stand to lose a few pounds or that his stomach was getting bigger, he’d shrug and go back to watching American Chopper on TLC. If he said the same thing to me, I would cry and likely seek legal counsel.

His blood pressure went up and he cut back on the ice cream, got on the treadmill and now has it under control. He might like it that his pants fit better in the waist, but only because he doesn’t have to buy new pants now.

As for me and my friends, we talk about weight only slightly less than we talk about our children and much more than important world events.

I would come to some profound and maybe even witty conclusion at this point, but I have to go downstairs and pretend that blueberries and Cool Whip are what I really want for dessert. And that I don’t deeply resent my husband for eating coffee chocolate chunk ice cream.

The gods have no sense of humor.

Why do I get the feeling that if I jumped in front of a speeding train to rescue a group of orphans, at the press conference awarding me my medal for bravery, someone would ask me how it felt spending my career around naked men in lockerrooms?

Everyone wants to know about the naked men.

For a while, I thought maybe it had finally become a non-issue. I would speak to school groups and the kids had moved onto more mature topics like, “How much money do you make?”

I swear, a kid asked me that once. I glanced over at the teacher, waiting for, “Tommy, that’s not an appropriate question for our guest,” but she was leaning forward, waiting for my answer.

I attempted to steer the kid away from the topic with a gentle, “Oh, I make enough, Tommy. Now buzz off,” but he was persistent.

His little hand shot up again and this time he asked, “What kind of car do you drive?”

It almost made me yearn for the naked men questions again. But alas, they had not gone away as I have discovered over the past few days in interviews promoting my biography of Lou Piniella.

We talk about Lou. Maybe we talk about the state of journalism. And then, boom, there it is, always asked as if we don’t have a female Speaker of the House, Secretary of State and something called bath towels.

I won’t pretend it did not used to be a concern 25 years ago, when I was first starting out in the business. Primarily, I wondered how I would feel when I was in my 40s, traipsing around lockerrooms with men who could, theoretically, be my sons.

But then I figured no way would I still be in the business that old anyway.  Yes, I was apparently a smart ass.

And now, here I am, in my 40s, and it looks as if I will be back in lockerrooms one day soon. Funny thing is, it has never been much of an issue for me or any other woman I’ve ever known in this business. I always did my job, held my notebook at strategic angles when necessary, and got the heck out as soon as humanly possible.

Turns out, I don’t care if the men are 20, 25 or 30. It is still an unpleasant place to be, always was and is the same for every male reporter or cameraman in there unless there is something seriously wrong with them.  To imply that it is only uncomfortable for women is to believe that it is natural for a roomful of grown-ups to do their jobs with only half of the people wearing clothes.

Occasionally and just the other day, someone will think they’re brilliant when they come up with the argument, “How would women athletes feel with male reporters in the lockerroom?” This is usually asked with utter seriousness, as if thousands of male reporters are storming women’s sporting events.

I’m sure there is the exception or two, but generally speaking, a female athlete will go anywhere she is asked to be interviewed, in any state of sweatiness and in any scenario, including having just lost a major championship because of her blunder. She will do this because women, almost without exception, understand that to be a professional athlete in this country is to also be a p.r. person, a marketing executive and a ticket agent, if necessary.

That said, I have noticed in covering the WNBA that the younger women athletes have become just as capable of being moody, surly and generally unquotable as their male counterparts, which is certainly encouraging for the women’s movement.

But it has nothing to do with where they are standing at the moment and whether they are dressed or not.

Here’s the other thing. Professional athletes – even the big-bellied offensive linemen — don’t much care who sees them naked. They really don’t. You see this same phenomenon in your typical public pool lockerroom, where there are always those people who prance around way too long without their clothes on (I assume this happens in men’s public lockerrooms but I can’t say for sure as I do not want to be arrested.)

If you’ve ever noticed – again, at least in the women’s lockerrooms – the naked people generally fall into two categories: the really great-looking, middle-aged women, usually with some form of surgical enhancement, or the really old women who just don’t give a damn whom they’re grossing out.

Same with athletes, minus the surgical enhancement  (but occasionally chemical help). And substitute the really old people with coaches (who occupy the section of the lockerroom I do everything in my power to avoid).

Most of this I can’t share in my radio interviews unless I want the FCC involved.

 But I’m thinking about it.

Whenever possible and especially when the occasion is a truly special one like it was today, I will not hesitate to embarrass our children.

I believe it keeps them humble, builds their character and is a great source of amusement for my husband and I.

It’s nothing major, mind you. This morning, all it really consisted of was marching our 13-year-old daughter Amanda out in front of the house and making her pose for pictures. When you’re 13, it doesn’t take much.

My intention was to duplicate the photo we took of her and her father on the first day of kindergarten, today, on her last day of eighth grade.

 I remember that day in the fall of 2000 very well, especially the part where I chased the bus down the street weeping. No doubt the bus driver remembers it also.

Three years later, when it was time for our son Alec to begin school, I was considerably better.  I had no fears of putting my baby on a strange bus with a strange man behind the wheel to be whisked away to a strange school, because I had Amanda.

“Watch your little brother,” I instructed. “Take care of your little brother.”

I only said it about 20, 25 times. And imagine my surprise when the school nurse called about 15 minutes later to inform me that Amanda was in her office with a stomach-ache.

“You made me so nervous,” my eight-year-old lectured me when she got home that day and for years afterward.

Such is the burden on the first child, the guinea kid in the parental laboratory.  We swaddle a little too tightly, nap a little too strictly, don’t let them eat dropped food and by the time they’re about 10, they start giving us that look that tells us they know we’re amateurs.

But we plow along, taking our pictures and trying to act like we’re in charge.

So when did it happen? Was it sixth grade or seventh or just this past year when I looked at my little girl and a teenager looked back? When it became clear that the foundation had been set and that it’s now largely up to her what kind of person she chooses to become?

Tonight, as they came marching in to the first strains of Pomp and Circumstance, I watched as they walked by and I saw them as pre-schoolers – Adam with his vivid imagination and Jason with his mischievous grin, Alec’s seriousness and Samantha’s innocence.

I listened as the school superintendent told them they were not just our future but our very hope for that future, that in the coming years they would be learning technology as yet unknown, to perform jobs not yet invented, in order to solve problems of which we were not yet aware.  

It is what kids all over the country are being told this week but these were our kids. Our babies. And there they were, the junior high graduating Class of 2009, walking back past us with all of the confidence and conviction of burgeoning adults.

We caught up with Amanda in the cafeteria afterward and lined her up for picture after picture. She was, of course, somewhat mortified by her parents as was every other graduate in the room.  But then that’s our job.

And I knew the cool was a façade. I knew that even in the midst of the can’t-wait-to-get-out-of-junior-high fever that had overtaken her and many of her classmates these last few weeks and months, there was something they could not deny.

It hit Amanda and her friend Jamie as they walked home today on their last day of eighth grade near tears before turning around and giving the school crossing guard a hug goodbye.

They know what we know.

That there’s no going back.  

You have to love children.

That’s what my mother-in-law, who spent her entire career as a teacher and school administrator, tells me about the profession.  

I love children. Or my own, at least. But I question whether I have the aptitude to teach — and by aptitude, I mean the self-control necessary not to be mean to other people’s kids.

As another academic year comes to a close, it is once again time for me to marvel at the extraordinary people teachers are.

The good news is my mother-in-law also tells me that more and more in recent years, teachers’ salaries and benefits are catching up with the rest of the working world. Throw in the lavender bath salts, ugly coffee mugs and little plaques with funny sayings and they’re practically rich.

Consider every kid who has ever thrown up in their classrooms and we’re back to break-even.

To be a teacher is to know, more intimately than any parent wants to begin to imagine, what is going on in your house on any given day.

To be a teacher is to go through that first year on the job when every kid sent to school sick passes their ungodly germs onto them. “No immunity yet,” my mother-in-law sniffs.

To be a teacher in today’s world is to know which kid has peanut allergies and how to work the EpiPen.  

And to be a teacher is to know how it feels to be told by the parents of the most obnoxious kid in your class just how special their little darling is, and how inadequate you are in not appreciating it.

In a teacher’s favor, kids are usually a little better behaved in school than they are, say, at your house for a birthday party. They seem to just know, from the first day of kindergarten, that throwing themselves on the floor until they turn blue will not have a positive result.

At school, kids believe all that stuff about their permanent records.   

But not always.

Sometimes, teachers get kids who can’t concentrate in class because their parents are doing drugs at home. And sometimes, teachers get kids whose parents appear fine but who they suspect are the source of the strange bruises they see.

Years ago, my mother-in-law taught at a school where they had to herd the children away from the windows when the gunfire from nearby rooftops broke out.

She bought school supplies and lunches and extra clothes in case of accidents. She worked to get the really gifted kids scholarships to lab schools.

But ask what she remembers most and it was the kid who innocently played with the one little toe that stuck out of her sandal during circle time.

And being called “Mommy” by too many blushing children to count.  

It was recognizing that funny gagging sound just before running for the sawdust.

You have to love children.