Anniversary of a life-changing event.

My former newspaper in its heyday.

Today is the anniversary of an event I probably shouldn't want to remember. It's three years to the day when I was called into the former publisher's office at The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass., where I had toiled as an award-winning sportswriter for the better part of five decades, and was told I was no longer of any use to the new ownership.

It took less than a month for the carpetbaggers from Canada to eliminate five vital newsroom positions, including mine. Only nine months earlier, there had been a giant poster hanging from the front of our building, bearing my likeness and imploring passers-by to play my annual football contest. I was called "the face of The Sun Chronicle" (insert derisive jokes here) in my last five performance reviews. Like so many others in the noble profession of journalism, I was out the door and on the street because penurious venture capitalists cared only about the bottom line and not whether the public would be properly informed.

Me at Lambeau Field in 2006.

Fortunately, I was in good shape. I had planned to retire in March 2019 anyway, my finances were in order, I had no mortgages nor any major obligations, and thus I was ready to start a new phase of my life. But they didn't let me write a farewell column, which is something I'll always regret. God knows it would have been a lot better than the shit that passes for columns on the paper's editorial and sports pages today.

Briefly, I resumed my role as a part-time writer for the Associated Press, covering the Patriots -- a job I had previously held from 1982-2004 in addition to my duties in Attleboro. But a combination of the pandemic and my new part-time job as a play-by-play sports announcer for local cable TV systems convinced me earlier this year to surrender the AP job and put the Patriots in my rear-view mirror. I don't regret it ... especially now that the mirror is attached to a Mercedes-Benz. Gotta love those retirement accounts!

At Super Bowl XLVI, one of the Pats' losses.

No, I don't have the audience I once had. Play-by-play isn't the kind of thing that you can clip and affix to your refrigerator with magnets to show off your son's or daughter's big play that was captured in the pages of the newspaper. But still, people tell me that they miss my work and that the newspaper is no longer their local news source because there's no news in it. I feel badly when they say the latter part of that, because I know there are still hard-working and dedicated journalists there, doing the best they can under what must be close to intolerable conditions. 

But there's nothing I can do about that. My responsibility now is to be the best announcer I can be for the teams I cover, and I take that quite seriously. I loved working at the newspaper all those years, but in the end, as it is with almost every profession, the love was somewhat unrequited. So we move on.

I'll tell you this much. These past three years have been happier for me, even with the pandemic and a few ailments and other irritations, than most of the last five years of my career at the Blue Ribbon Daily. If not for Malcolm Butler's interception, the huge comeback against Atlanta, and the state basketball championships by the Feehan girls, the Foxboro girls and the Mansfield boys, I might have wanted to be out of that place a lot sooner -- especially when they killed the Sunday edition.

That's all in the past. Onward and upward.