Long before I was blessed to get the best gig on the planet — working at the best tabloid newspaper in the world in the greatest sport city in the nation — I started out as a cub reporter at the Greenwich Time and the Stamford Advocate in Fairfield County, Conn.
I’ll never forget the day I walked into the office to see one of the best newspaper men I’d ever come to know, Joe Pisani, my executive editor, and give him my two-week notice.
Pisani had been there, done that.
He had worked at the New York Times, covered the big stories, worked his way up to running a great small-town paper.
“Go ahead,” Pisani said with a sigh. “Chase your dreams. But you will always remember these days.’’
He was right. I still remember walking down Greenwich Avenue and bumping into high school coaches or the parents of prep players I covered and talking about their teams, their kids. What a blessing.
And I remember writing a sophomoric column poking fun at the nickname of the Danbury High School — the Hatters.
Ooh, here come the Fighting Hatters, quick hide the women and children.
The mayor at the time wrote me a wonderfully informative letter — yes, a letter on paper that arrived in an envelope with a stamp, Google it! — explaining the wonderful history of the town, once the hat-making capital of the nation. He boasted about the hard-working, decent people that made up his town.
I thought a lot about those people on Saturday as I went through the motions of my job. Danbury Hospital is less than 13 miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, where the most unfathomable horrors of horrors took place on Friday.
It’s where two of the 26 victims of a madman’s trigger finger died. I scanned the list of victims, praying I didn’t recognize a name, praying harder for the names I didn’t recognize.
Many of the victims were six and seven. On Sunday, my family celebrated my son’s eighth birthday. We played dodgeball with his friends, and ate cake and opened presents.
And then my email chimed, alerting me the seven Catholic schools that have decided to leave the Big East had officially announced their intentions. Must be a joke, I thought.
Saturday? With a town grieving unspeaking grief, with children traumatized, perhaps for the rest of their lives, with the image of our president wiping away tears, the Group of Seven decided this was day to officially announce what The Post had first reported on Thursday.
Saturday?
“The tragedy that took place in Newtown on Friday should be the focus of the thoughts of the people in Connecticut and all Husky fans this weekend,” UConn President Susan Herbst said in statement.
“We ask our fans to steer all passion and concern to Newtown, and we will honor those lost when we gather together as a university community for events this upcoming week.”
I know the Sacred College of Cardinals locks itself away in the resplendent Sistine Chapel when it must choose a new pope, but you’ve got to wonder what cave the presidents of the Group of Seven were holed up in when they decided Saturday was the day to make their petty announcement.
Please, tell me they weren’t as shallow as to think, “If we announce on Saturday, we’ll get coverage in the Sunday paper, the largest and most widely circulated edition of every paper not named USA Today.”
It barely matters in this story that Connecticut is one of the three universities being left behind. It doesn’t matter Herbst has been as two-faced as one of those comedy-tragedy masks:
One month she’s letting the ACC know Connecticut is tearing up its Big East stationery, the next month she’s on the phone imploring the Group of Seven to reconsider.
She was just doing her job. At least on Saturday, she was the one university president that got it right.
St. John’s defeated St. Francis of Brooklyn Saturday night at Barclays Center and, having lived through 9-11 and Superstorm Sandy, I recognize there is a healing in playing the games.
But why But why was St. John’s president Father Donald J. Harrington holding a conference call 30 minutes before the tip-off of his team’s game to discuss the Group of Seven’s decision?
Better yet, why wasn’t there a statement from the Group of Seven, from St. John’s, from Georgetown, expressing their sympathy for Newtown? What cave?
Perhaps in time, the horror and grief of Friday’s shooting will be lessened by love and prayer. Maybe that’s naïve or flat out wrong.
Maybe Newtown should remain as painful in 10 years as it is today. Maybe that will be the wedge needed to convince Americans the right to bear arms — I once owned a gorgeous Smith and Wesson .357 revolver — needs to stop at the right to bear automatic weapons.
As But as the Group of Seven move forward — to form a new Big East with the likes of Butler, Creighton, Gonzaga, Dayton, Duquesne, Saint Louis, St. Mary’s and Xavier — they should never forget how they dropped the ball.
They have tried to stake out the moral high ground throughout this era of realignment. Saturday they couldn’t have gone any lower.