I’m not sure when I stopped being nervous and excited meeting famous athletes.

I know I used to think it was pretty cool interviewing Iowa football coach Hayden Fry and basketball coach Lute Olsen while still a student reporter for the Daily Iowan.

I remember being in awe of Sandy Koufax when I met him at the Dodgers’ spring training compound in Vero Beach, Fla., in my early years with Florida Today newspaper.

And I remember feeling extremely nervous the first time I ventured into the Bears visiting lockerroom at Tampa Stadium as the Tampa Bay Bucs beat reporter, also very early in my professional career.

I recall getting teased by a player for being in there, nothing out of the ordinary in those days, and I also remember Walter Payton coming to my defense. It was 1984, the year before the Bears would win the Super Bowl, and Payton followed me outside of the tiny dressing room and invited me onto the team bus to interview whomever I wanted.

Now I was young and I might have been every so slightly naïve. But I wasn’t that young and naïve. I knew Payton was a joker and I was not going to bound up the steps and onto the Bears team bus – the BEARS, for crying out loud, my beloved hometown team – like some gullible rookie only to have some colossal embarrassment befall me.

I was going to walk very slowly onto the Bears team bus and just see what happened.

I actually talked to a few players, though I have no memory or who they were or what they said or how I got off the bus.

From then on, I was, I wouldn’t say jaded but certainly a little numb. I’m sure the first time I ever interviewed Michael Jordan, I was impressed. But I was 30 years old by then, had interviewed hundreds of athletes and coaches; many had burst my bubble in terms of my expectations for them; and I had been into too many smelly, sweaty lockerrooms under the pressure of an impending deadline to think it was all that mystical anymore.

All that said, put me within drooling distance of anyone in the entertainment industry, and I become a goofy, star struck fan.

This weekend, my mother-in-law took the girls in the family to see the play “Legally Blonde” and after we left, another friend steered us toward the stage door. I had never waited outside a stage door and just seeing the words “Stage Door” was very exciting.

I grabbed my niece Erica’s camera, and as soon as the first actor emerged, pushed her and my daughter Amanda toward him, urging them to pose. Who was I? As the others filed out, I tried some witty, nervous repartee, just to show what a regular person I thought they were and what a really cool, casual person I was.

“So, are you in a really bad mood whenever you’re off-stage?” I blurted out to the star of the play, the actress who plays Elle Woods, I meant because she was so incurably perky and energetic on-stage. But it didn’t really come out that way, I heard nervous laughter around me and the actress was kind enough to actually pretend as though she understood what I meant and I was not some psychotic stalker.

“My face does hurt from smiling so much,” she said kindly.    I’m sure if I covered the entertainment industry, it would be different. I would be writing about cocaine rather than steroid addiction and I’d probably end up identifying even more with celebrities the first time I discovered up close that at 5-foot-2, I was taller than most Hollywood actors.

But I think I would enjoy writing those women’s magazine features. You know, the ones that start, “Reese Witherspoon swept into the Polo Lounge with a flurry of air kisses and apologies for being late.

“I’m so sorry,” the dynamic young actress told me exclusively as she bit into her tuna fish sandwich.

I could do that.

But I would definitely not like the part where you have to dress up to cover the Oscars,  like anyone cares what reporters are wearing in the press room. Plus, I’d rather not sweat in a full-length gown, thank you very much, nor accidentally bump into Halle Berry on the way to the bathroom in her haute couture and me in my ensemble from Macy’s.

I have enough issues.  

Eventually, I am sure I would become one of the gang, stop sweating, maybe upgrade my wardrobe and learn to air kiss complete strangers. I might even be able to bump into, say, a Tom Hanks, and act as if I do it all the time. 

But George Clooney? Not a chance. Unless I was taller than him, of course.

I am trying to embrace change. 
 

For example, the words above were the very first ones typed on my new non-Tribune laptop. For about an hour before that, I navigated the Internet for the first time on this foreign being, tried to locate all the cool new functions and yelled at my husband.
 

It then took me five minutes to craft this sentence because every time I typed a word, I inadvertently breathed on something that kept defining everything and then making it disappear. So I yelled at my husband some more.
 

Now I am exhausted.
 

This is not my first new laptop. In my 26 years of sportswriting, I have had many different models beginning with a “portable” computer roughly the size of a Datsun. To send my stories to the newsroom, I would first crouch in front of the headlights of my car (I was covering high school football in Central Florida in the early 1980s, and this is what we did), frantically punching in codes and secret formulas that I usually forgot.
 

Then I would take the giant black, rubber couplers that came with the “Port O’ Bubble” (this is seriously what the computer was called even though it was about as portable as a console television) and try to stretch them to the nearest phone booth (we also had phone booths then).
 

The couplers were supposed to fit over the handset of the phone. And they did – the first time anyone used them. Every time after that, they were stretched out sufficiently as to lose the connection of the phone signal the first 47 times you tried it. 
 

Over the next decade or so in the world of newspapers, we had a succession of Radio Shack laptops that were much more modern and much more compact – so much so that it displayed no more than three lines of type. Oh yes, and the screen was flush against the keyboard so you had to climb up above the computer, or perhaps sit on several pillows, if you hoped to actually see what you wrote. Mostly you just hoped for the best.
 

No matter which newspaper I was working for at the time – Florida Today, the Orlando Sentinel, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune – every other paper seemed to have better laptops than we did. They were always faster, sleeker, cooler. And just when we’d get an upgrade, everyone else did too.
 

There was, however, always one equalizer. Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the laptop keyboard – or any keyboard for that matter – is not built to absorb liquid. At all. Not a drip from a cup of Coke jostled by another sportswriter’s belly. Not the spray from that same cup generated by an out-of-control Shaquille O’Neal barrelling toward the press table.
 

And strangely, not an entire cup of beer spilled directly onto your computer from an over-zealous fan leaning over the press box at the old Chicago Stadium. This happened to me once and trust me, all the cursing in the world will not bring it – or your story – back to life. I think I heard my laptop actually moan as it died. Or maybe that was me. No, I was swearing like a sailor, so it had to be the computer.
 

The tech support guys said they never actually saw a mother board completely submerged in Budweiser. Amstel Light, yes, but never Bud. But this was actually a fairly frequent happening in the Stadium press box in the early days of laptops. The roar of the crowd, followed by the swearing of a sportswriter who had beer dumped on their computer. After a while, there was almost a certain charm to it.
 

So I tried to never get emotionally attached to my computer. If it died, I would move on, usually upgrade, adjust. Or at least I thought I was adjusting. What I didn’t realize is that for the last 10 years or so, I have had computers extremely similar. They looked pretty much the same, felt the same and all had a little button thing in the middle of the keyboard that served as the mouse.
 

I have recently discovered that laptops are not made with the little button things anymore. That touch pads have been in vogue for some time now. I do not like the touch pad. No, I hate the touch pad. These last 14 paragraphs have taken me about four hours to compose, mostly because of the touch pad, along with the periodic yelling at my husband.
 

I FEEL LIKE MY WRITING HAS BEEN ADVERSELY AFFECTED. See? I meant to write, I feel like my writing has been adversely affected, but I was so distracted by the whole touch pad thing that the caps lock key got bad vibes.
 

I am trying to embrace change, I really am. And as soon as I yell at my husband again, I’ll let you know how it’s going.