Ramble On ... Beanpot.

So, Tony Soprano says he's had enough "COVERT" pub for one week. Okay, we'll move on, as we don't want the book to get overexposure, eh?

So, the news item: Monday night will be a first.

I will be sitting with my in-laws for my very first Beanpot tournament. The Beanpot, for those tuning in from outside the Boston/New England area, is an annual college hockey tournament staged mid-season between Northeastern, Boston U, Boston College and Harvard.

The first game saw Harvard upset a very good Northeastern team to place The Crimson men in the finals against Boston College. I have always wanted to attend but could never get away from NYC or the NBA All-Star Game prep in the week leading up to the NBA's busiest weekend of the year.

Here is a Boston Globe feature on the big game:

56TH BEANPOT
Harvard finally able to advance its cause

By John Powers, Globe Staff | February 10, 2008

Mike Taylor has played in three Beanpots and never seen a final.

‘‘I definitely don’t watch the championship game,’’ says Harvard’s hockey co-captain. ‘‘It’s bitter. I just get on the bus and go back.’’

It has been 15 years since the silver trophy has been on the other side of the Charles and 10 since the Crimson have played in the final. But this time, because of one big night that began with seven startling minutes against favored Northeastern, Harvard will be playing for all the beans in Boston tomorrow.

‘‘You get back to campus after the Beanpot and nobody talks to you about it because you lost,’’ says Taylor, whose teammates will take on ninth-ranked Boston College in the tournament’s 56th title game. ‘‘Now it’s, ‘Where can I get tickets? Is there going to be a bus going there?’.’’

Time was when the city’s February clan war was a huge deal around the Square. Harvard won four of the first 10 tournaments and made the finals five times between 1974 and 1981. But since their last victory, in 1993, the Crimson have gone 6-23, with only three first-round victories and nine last-place finishes.

‘‘There’s no denying that we’ve had great disappointment over the years in the Beanpot, and we make no excuses,’’ says coach Ted Donato, who won the Beanpot as a sophomore with Harvard’s 1989 national champions.

Not that winning it has been easy for anyone other than Boston University, which has claimed 28 titles and 11 of the last 13. BC has managed only two since 1994 and Northeastern hasn’t won since 1988.

But until the Crimson won last Monday, they had survived the first night only twice in 14 years. They had become hockey’s groundhogs, popping up their heads briefly on one chilly February day, then vanishing.

‘‘Without that buzz, without that success in the past, the Beanpot has been downplayed around here,’’ acknowledges Donato.

Harvard hockey has been mostly about March and the mad scramble to make it to the NCAAs, which the Crimson have done five times in six years. After a nine-game winless streak from early December until mid-January — its worst slump in a dozen years — Harvard now has to run the table to land a berth.

‘‘Maybe we can get on a roll here,’’ says Taylor, whose team won at Union Friday night but will have to win the ECAC tournament to earn a bid.

Harvard was on a lovely roll in November, going 6-2-1 with a victory over archrival Cornell and an overtime decision at BU.

‘‘We had a great start and it was, ‘OK, now what?’.’’ says Taylor. ‘‘.‘Where do we go from here?’ Maybe we got lazy mentally. You look at some of our losses and ties and they were games that had been going our way. Maybe it was just a mind-set that we lost for a while.’’

When the Crimson came out of exams and won by two goals at Dartmouth, they appeared to be back in business. Then they went to Brown and lost, 4-2, to a squad that had won one game all season.

‘‘Saturday morning wasn’t exactly the most fun practice,’’ observes cocaptain Dave MacDonald, whose mates skated for half an hour after it was over.

It was time, Donato concluded, for the team to take ‘‘a real good hard look’’ at itself and also to take a glimpse at the past. So he punched up a Beanpot highlights video.

‘‘We just wanted to have them appreciate the history and the history of Harvard in the tournament,’’ Donato says. ‘‘To hear and see great legends of Beanpots past really struck a note with our guys.’’

If their coach had gotten his hands on the silver pot, why couldn’t they?

‘‘When we play our game, we’re a very tough team to play against,’’ says MacDonald. ‘‘I think we can beat anyone in the country.’’

When the Crimson have been at their best, they’ve forechecked relentlessly, played shut-down defense in front of goalie Kyle Richter, and excelled on special teams. That was the plan against Northeastern, which hadn’t lost a Beanpot opener to Harvard in 15 years.

What nobody expected was three goals in the first seven minutes, by Paul Dufault, Taylor, and Doug Rogers — two of them within 33 seconds.

‘‘We didn’t hang back and let them dictate how the game was going to go,’’ says MacDonald. ‘‘We just went out and played our game and forced them to adapt to us. That’s the recipe for success for any good team.’’

The Huskies never recovered, and the Crimson found themselves in a rare situation, wondering whom they would rather meet in the final.

‘‘It’s a nice problem to finally have to think about,’’ says Donato. ‘‘For the first time in four years, I was interested in what happened in the second game.’’

For the past decade, the routine had been the same. Lose the opener, go back across the river, have a late dinner, and return listlessly on the following Monday to play the consolation game before mothers, lovers, roommates, and thousands of empty seats.

‘‘You have to create your own atmosphere, your own energy,’’ says Richter, whose teammates have dropped two of their last three ‘‘consols.’’

That won’t be a problem tomorrow night, when the Crimson will be playing in front of a full house for the grand prize.

‘‘What greater venue, what larger pressure cooker could you be in?’’ muses Donato.

And what greater challenge could Harvard be facing? BC, which knocked off BU in overtime to advance, is 11-2-2 since the end of November, including a 7-2 tap-dance at Harvard that marked the Crimson’s biggest beating from the Eagles in 25 years.

‘‘Discipline will be a huge thing,’’ acknowledges MacDonald, whose colleagues last time conceded four goals on 10 power plays, three of them by Nathan Gerbe, who had four in all.

If they’re off their game, the Crimson very well could take another beating from last year’s NCAA finalists. But if they’re on, they could be hoisting the trophy by midnight. One lesson they’ve learned over the years, usually to their dismay, is that November’s results mean little in February.

‘‘That’s the great thing about the Beanpot,’’ says Rogers. ‘‘Every year, you get a fresh start at it.’’

It has been a decade since Harvard has had this favorable a start, and its Second Night routine admittedly seems odd. Guys in scarlet jerseys playing in a near-empty house at 5 o’clock? Isn’t that the Crimson’s assignment?

‘‘I’m not sure there were many tears shed for us over the years,’’ Donato says, smiling. ‘‘So I won’t light any candles for them, either.’’

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com

***

Since we're not talking about Covert, I won't take time to mention or drop the links into blog for david Aldridge's great piece in the Philly Inquirer or Mike Fine's story in the Patriot Ledger, among others.

Okay Tony?

***

Great news from Hollywood... this from the WSJ:

Tentative Deal Seen for Writers
By MERISSA MARR
February 10, 2008 7:24 a.m.

Taking a major step toward ending a crippling three-month writers' strike, the Writers Guild of America said it had reached a "tentative deal" for a new three-year contract with the major Hollywood studios and television networks, and urged its members to accept it.

"We believe that continuing the strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks and that the time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike," the guild wrote in a letter to its 10,500 voting members overnight.

The complete text of the letter:

To Our Fellow Members,

We have a tentative deal.

It is an agreement that protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery. It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, "When they get paid, we get paid."

Specific terms of the agreement are described in the summary on our website and will be further discussed at our Saturday membership meetings on both coasts. At those meetings we will also discuss how we will proceed regarding ratification of this agreement and lifting the restraining order that ends the strike.

Less than six months ago, the AMPTP wanted to enact profit-based residuals, defer all Internet compensation in favor of a study, forever eliminate "distributor's gross" valuations, and enforce 39 pages of rollbacks to compensation, pension and health benefits, reacquisition, and separated rights. Today, thanks to three months of physical resolve, determination, and perseverance, we have a contract that includes WGA jurisdiction and separated rights in new media, residuals for Internet reuse, enforcement and auditing tools, expansion of fair market value and distributor's gross language, improvements to other traditional elements of the MBA, and no rollbacks.

Over these three difficult months, we shut down production of nearly all scripted content in TV and film and had a serious impact on the business of our employers in ways they did not expect and were hard pressed to deflect. Nevertheless, an ongoing struggle against seven, multinational media conglomerates, no matter how successful, is exhausting, taking an enormous personal toll on our members and countless others. As such, we believe that continuing to strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks and that the time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike.

Much has been achieved, and while this agreement is neither perfect nor perhaps all that we deserve for the countless hours of hard work and sacrifice, our strike has been a success. We activated, engaged, and involved the membership of our Guilds with a solidarity that has never before occurred. We developed a captains system and a communications structure that used the Internet to build bonds within our membership and beyond. We earned the backing of other unions and their members worldwide, the respect of elected leaders and politicians throughout the nation, and the overwhelming support of fans and the general public. Our thanks to all of them, and to the staffs at both Guilds who have worked so long and patiently to help us all.

There is much yet to be done and we intend to use all the techniques and relationships we've developed in this strike to make it happen. We must support our brothers and sisters in SAG who, as their contract expires in less than five months, will be facing many of the same challenges we have just endured. We must further pursue new relationships we have established in Washington and in state and local governments so that we can maintain leverage against the consolidated multinational conglomerates with whom we bargain. We must be vigilant in monitoring the deals that are made in new media so that in the years ahead we can enforce and expand our contract. We must fight to get decent working conditions and benefits for writers of reality TV, animation, and any other genre in which writers do not have a WGA contract.

Most important, however, is to continue to use the new collective power we have generated for our collective benefit. More than ever, now and beyond, we are all in this together.

Best,

Michael Winship