No. 210: WAYNE GRETZKY, BRETT CALLIGHEN, BUGSY WATSON & STAN OBODIAC / I had it made when I got into the Oilers' practice on their first-ever trip to the Gardens. Or so I thought.

With a con job I had my chance to write about the next big thing in the game. What could go wrong except everything, starting with me?

IT took me three tries to get into journalism school and that along with my toil in dead-end jobs prompted the dean to look upon me with a degree of sympathy. (I probably confused respect with what was in fact pity, but no matter.) The dean saw to it that I picked up a few hours each week working in the department’s clipping library, a bit of pocket change but also a chance to survey newspapers great and small, from the Wall Street Journal to the Manitoulin Expositer. Given that I had already been poring over Esquire, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, the Village Voice and everything in the sporting press, I was likely the best-read student in course, if the measure were sheer volume rather than quality or insight gleaned.

Alas, all the reading in the clippings library didn’t translate into a keen sense of story. I leaned towards subject material that I thought would be fun to write, rather than the stuff that anticipated the news cycle, what everyone would be talking about tomorrow. It w…