Dan leans back in his chair, chewing his pencil. “At 27, the skip is the oldest member of the team,” he reads off the sheet.

“The Danish national curling team.”

“Yes.”

“What’s a skip?”

“I dunno. I think it might be the brooms they use.”

Casey swivels his chair around to raise his eyebrows at Dan. “The oldest member of the Danish national curling team is a broom?”

“Take it up with Jeremy, he wrote this.”

“I can’t believe this is the more sane topic of conversation,” Jeremy said as he leaned forward around her and addressed Dan, “but if you don’t play golf, how can you have given it up?”

“By declaring it.” Dan stood up. “I have given up golf,” he announced again. He looked around to make sure everyone heard him before returning to his seat. “See?”

Where Dan's sure it's the bad kind of day, Casey's an idiot (in Dana's opinion) and Sports Illustrated's list of 100 Most Influential People is leaked earlier than it should be.

"You promised you wouldn't bring that up ever again."

Dan gave the pen a casual flip. "I lied."

"Forgotten, you said. Wiped from your memory, you said."

"You can't expect me to let material like that go to waste. I'm a writer, Casey."

"Apparently you're also a liar."

"Isaac, you were supposed to retire years ago," Dana says. She's sitting in front of his desk, leafing through a Real Simple magazine. Dana has big plans to live simple. Isaac doubts she's ever actually finished unpacking her apartment.

"I already did that. Retirement is boring."

"You could play golf," Dan says. He's reading over Dana's shoulder.

"I'm black, Danny."

"Tiger Woods is black."

"But I am also cool."

"Are you saying Tiger Woods isn't cool, Isaac?" Dana asks, surprised.

"No one who owns that many polo shirts is cool."

"...and thank you for watching SportsCenter."

"Sports Night."

"Thank you for--not watching SportsCenter?"

"Don't worry, I'll slap him after the show for you, everyone. Good night."

Danny shrugs. "I've always been a little obtuse," he says. "I think God made me prettier to compensate, though."

"Danny."

Actually, Danny's plenty smart. Certainly smart enough to know not to push someone into homicidal rage when he's alone with them in an elevator, so he holds his hands up.

You probably won't believe it either, but I swear everything I'm about to tell you is true.

"I have it on reliable authority that you're, and I quote, 'acting weird'." "Not much of a quote." "Sources are being remarkably cagey, so I figured I'd go to the -" dammit - "source." Dan didn't respond, other than to toss him the thesaurus.

Natalie pulled the grape sucker out of her mouth with a pop and pointed it at Casey. "For implying that I am a witch, your pants privileges have hereby been revoked." "Hey!" Casey protested. Dan patted Casey's shoulder. "Should've stuck with Henry V."

She ran into Isaac in the hallway. "Isaac! Dan and Casey are - "

"If you're going to finish that sentence with anything other than 'in their seats in the studio' or 'on fire' I don't want to hear it," Isaac told her.

"Dear Abby," he writes at the top of a blank page, "Let me tell you the one about the bishop and the fullback. It's a good one. It's way better than the one about Casey."

"Also, you like to make Dan leave the Northeast corridor every once in a while?"

"You're on the right track."

"And he might run into Civil War reenactors and freak out?"

"There's that."

"And it's fun to say Chattanooga?"

"There you have it.

"But if Hansbrough was lost," Dan said. "And hungry. And it was just him, and you, and no food, in the dark alley. He might eat you. Or Noah's black market babies." "He's a power forward, Danny, not a cannibal."

It happened like this: a man walked into a bar. It was snowing. No one yelled, "Norm!" as Jim walked through the door, but he had "sometimes you gotta go where everybody knows your name" stuck in his head for a week.

“So you think it’s a ghost.”

“I do.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“I’m going to call a guy.”

“You’re going to call a guy?”

“I am.”

“You know a guy who can take care of this?”

“I do.”

"Good. Be funny Friday ... Esther and I are having friends over. I told everyone I know that my boys were going to be on television."

"We're on television every night, Isaac."

"Yeah, but this is special."

He's never had a job that has made him want to work extra hours, come in Saturdays and nights, spend his free time thinking about it. But now, Sunday afternoon in the summer when his friends are at cookouts, or watching the game, he's here.

“Let’s get this straight. Using the first person plural you, second person singular, invited me, first person singular, out whilst including me in the original first person plural grouping.”

It matters just as much where we come from as where we end up.

"I think we should make this a regular thing."

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but only in a very inadequate dictionary.

Then go! On shiksa, on blondie, on WASP'y and whitebread. On -- that's really all I had, there.

She hoped he didn't know just how far he could get with a please and a smile. It'd be all over for her.

It would be very, very bad to get caught trading innuendo with his co-anchor on the twenty-yard-line of Three Rivers Stadium.

It is Danny he sees most often there at the lighthouse in his memory, and the images are so clear, so perfect, that he has begun to believe that it must really have been a true place that they went when they were small.