Let’s say I’m 25 years old. (Play along, please.) Let’s say I’ve put in three or four years at my local newspaper and I’m ready to move on. On December 17, 2010, searching for the next adventure, I go to JournalismJobs.com. There I see the Helena Independent Record is looking for a sports editor. The salary range is $30,000 to $35,000.

The newspaper’s ad reads: “The Independent Record, an award-winning 15,000-circulation daily in state capital Helena, Montana, seeks a dynamic sports editor with excellent leadership, writing and design skills to lead its four-person staff in this sports powerhouse city in the heart of the Northern Rockies.”

I’m thinking, Montana?

“When you aren’t working, enjoy the myriad of recreational opportunities Helena has to offer in hiking, mountain biking, fly-fishing, skiing, boating and many more.”

I’m thinking, They’re selling fly-fishing?

The ad also says: “This fast-paced newspaper needs a self-starter who can make an immediate contribution to achieving a high level of excellence in the print and online products with compelling sports page design, enterprising sports news and feature reports, and multimedia presentation at helenanir.com.”

Better, sounds ambitious.

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It was an unusual venue for watching a Super Bowl. I was in Buenos Aires in 2008, surrounded mainly by transplanted Americans as the New England Patriots and New York Giants treated television viewers to one of the most memorable NFL games in history.

I had gone to Shoeless Joe’s El Alamo, a sports bar for expats in the Recoleta neighborhood, with a gang of people I had befriended during the month I spent in Argentina. I met them all at a language school I was attending, a place I went in hopes of learning Spanish. Most of the people I met were there for the same purpose, although I’m guessing they had much more success in mastering Spanish than I did.

But our language lessons didn’t fill the days. At tops, these classes lasted two hours, which gave all of us the rest of the summer day to explore Buenos Aires and experience the Argentine culture.

We didn’t hesitate to do so.

For we found plenty to experience in a city that has earned itself the nickname of “the Paris of South America.” If Paris is anything like Buenos Aires, I want to experience it as well. I found it hard to believe that Paris isn’t the “Buenos Aires of Europe.”

In the world of big cities, no place can possibly have the feel, pulse and warmth of Buenos Aires. The city is a mix of cultures – a racial melting pot in its truest sense that has stitched the ethnic heritages of diverse groups into a colorful tapestry. The words that people see on the Statue of Liberty could well fit on the “Obelisk” that serves as the North Star, a beacon guiding visitors through downtown Buenos Aires.

The city is more than sports bars, frightening cab rides and a gathering spot for foreigners. It is a place filled with history and style – a city with a swashbuckler’s flair. Buenos Aires has its quirks, too.

What city of more than 10 million people doesn’t?

Think I’m kidding? Well, try riding the rickety “A” line of the Subte (about 30 cents) to Plaza de Mayo-Carabobo and you’ll see a side of Buenos Aires that’s as gritty as any area of in Manhattan or Mumbai.

And like Manhattan and Mumbai, Buenos Aires has its distinct neighborhoods – even more of them than Manhattan. For Buenos Aires has a large footprint, one that stretches east and west, north and south.

Want to see colorful tenements, rubble and the hard-edged existence of the prideful “porteños”?

Then visit La Boca.

Fancy the nightlife?

Hit Las Canitas, Palermo and Zona Centro neighborhoods. You will  find everything there from the zoo to tango dancing in the streets to theaters and world-class museums.

How about good eats?

The cuisine in Buenos Aires ranges from Armenian to Indian to Thai, although if you’re looking for a Wendy’s, a White Castles or a Burger King, keep on lookin’. I didn’t find a one, but who travels outside the United States in hopes of eating on the cheap at a McDonald’s?

People come to Argentina for the meat. Argentina is steak country, and Morton’s or Peter Luger’s would do its diners a favor if it could offer a steak as tender and as succulent as you’d find in Buenos Aires.

Yet what makes Buenos Aires what the city is are the porteños, the Argentine people. They enjoy their lives, and they spend more time living it than thinking about it.

And that’s as much as anything else the reason they helped fill El Alamo two years ago watch this decidedly American sport. The Super Bowl has long been a signature event for Americans; the game is, however, simply a mere curiosity to Argentines.

But there the Argentines were this summer night, shoulder to shoulder in El Alamo with foreigners, watching on HDTV a game that didn’t resemble their football in any way. Yet they seemed to enjoy the game as much as the foreigners did.

Not that the Argentines understood the game. I doubt they did. But pour enough pints of Quilmas or Scotch ale down a man’s throat, and even curling might have its appeal.

On the eve of another Super Bowl, I expect the porteños will be bellying up to the wooden bar inside El Alamo, laughing and drinking and smiling and celebrating with their foreign friends.

I long to be there with them.

Every morning starts the same way for me, I roll over and check Twitter on my iPhone.

I check Twitter before I check my email, my text messages, or even get out of bed. My wife has even threatened to start her own Twitter account to remind me to take out the trash. I read all the news from the 170 or so people I follow and then I read every single thing y’all send my way. (Every morning for 786 consecutive days an Alabama fan has accused me of being gay).

Put simply, I’m addicted to Twitter.

If I could only consume one media product, Twitter would be my pick. Over any newspaper, over any single television station, over any book, magazine, website, radio station, or other media product you can name.

Basically, if I was stranded on a desert island and had a solar powered Twitter feed with working Internet service for that feed, I don’t think I’d be that lonely.

Yet, amazingly, only about 12% of y’all are even on Twitter so far. Go sign up now. And I preach this every time I talk about Twitter, just use my feed as a template for who to follow if Twitter seems too confusing.

Twitter is a media game-changer, the Cam Newton of Internet companies, and I’m going to tell you why.

1. Twitter empowers the individual.

The reason I started OKTC was because you can’t rely on big media companies anymore. FanHouse was chugging along with only positive reports. At the Auburn-Oregon BCS title game FanHouse sent four writers to Arizona.

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“W-w-w-hat is this?”

As he tore open the brightly colored paper, the boy’s heart dropped. It was flat, so it wasn’t a baseball or a glove.

He ran his fingers across the blue vinyl cover, touched the white sheets of paper, slowly bit his lip to keep from crying. This wasn’t a Christmas present, it was a school supply. It was a binder filled with blank pages. The boy looked angrily over at the balding man wearing a weary smile and a stray piece of tinsel on his shoulder.

“I-I-I can’t play with this,” the boy said.

“Yes, you can,” the father said.

The awkward, stammering eighth-grader slapped Jackson 5 and “Gilligan’s Island” stickers on the binder to at least make it look cool, then tucked it into the bottom drawer next to his plaid shorts and forgot all about it. The next time he saw it was March, three months later, as he headed out to watch a sandlot baseball game. He had earlier announced to his family that when he grew up, he was going be a sportswriter, using the universal language of bats and balls to connect to a world he couldn’t easily touch. On this day, he had finally worked up the courage to practice covering a game.

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The mood of Red Sox Nation is sour.

Anecdotally, we can guess that baseball fans around Boston are in a foul mood after seeing their team do everything short of set itself on fire after ending the season by losing 18 of its final 24 games. But we also know this thanks to the power of Twitter, which can be a fairly good gauge on people’s opinions, especially in sports.

That’s one of the reasons Boston.com decided to get into the sentiment analysis game with The Pulse, a tool that monitors social data to find moods and trends. They’re partnering with Mullen and Pointslocal to assess and map the data. At the moment, they’re sticking with sports, an area never short of passion or opinion. The mood of Sox fans is as pleasant as stale beer and an old bucket of Popeye’s, so luckily they’ve also launched The Pulse for the 5-1 New England Patriots, and soon the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins. (Feel free to insert a joke about sentiment over lack of a Celtics season here.)

“There are volumes of chatter out there,” said Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products for The Boston Globe. “If we can help people make sense of what is being said, that helps us fulfill our mission as a publication.”

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When we put a spotlight on intercollegiate sports – the big-time athletics played at Penn State, Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, Tennessee, Oregon, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Michigan, Notre Dame, North Carolina — we bat around terms like character, teamwork and never-quit spirit, traits that coaches claim mold boys into men.

But then we often steer the conversation toward a larger issue: What role do big-time athletics play in upholding the principles of higher education?

Pardon me if I don’t allow you to think overly hard for an answer. I’ll spare y’all the trouble. In one word: “Nothing.”

What intercollegiate sports have become are for-profit fiefdoms with no connection to the academic experience, writer Buzz Bissinger wrote in a recent blog.

“[T]hey are insulated kingdoms with their own rules and reigns of terror because of the money they make, trading in illegal recruiting and illegal gifts and illegal favors,” Bissinger said.

He decried the secrecy that keeps coaches and their programs insulated from public scrutiny. Their strict vows of silence are not unlike the “no-snitch culture” in urban America or, as he put it so well, the Mafia’s omerta, with an exception: “even the Mafia has higher moral standards.”

Well, a college coach might not be a mobster, but he’s definitely a goddamn pimp. He sweet-talks teenagers into putting their lives in his hands; he promises to fulfill their sports fantasies and to help them get a college degree in exchange for their unwavering loyalty.

Much like a Ponzi scheme, it’s no square deal. An athletes might get a degree, but his coach will certainly get adulation and millions of dollars to live on.

For at every program of any importance, the football and basketball coach make more than the university’s president. Top assistant coaches make more than the best professors, and a grad assistant can earn a handsome living and come away with a free education as well.

Look around at the grand cathedrals we build for our college sports. Ohio State, my alma mater, has poured more dollars into sports facilities than administrators have into what once was a top-rate journalism program but isn’t anymore. “The school up north,” as the late OSU coach Woody Hayes used to call Michigan, has embarked on a rebuilding program that will put a gloss on a basketball arena that was shiny enough already.

We commit millions to sports programs on college campuses, turning programs like Penn State and Ohio State into sacred institutions with resources that rival those of professional sports teams.

And what do we see in return? Athletes who live on the margins and a hot mess like Penn State.

In the history of intercollegiate sports, we’ve never heard anything quite like the sex scandal in un-Happy Valley, and God, please, spare us from ever hearing it anew. But not even the Almighty’s hand might not be able to ensure that other, almost as troubling, scandals don’t revisit us and then make their way onto SportsCenter one night soon. Scandal looks like the calling card of a corrupt or corrupting institution that has long played too big a part in the academic world.

Worst of all, the role of sports at major colleges grows like kudzu. Sports have become a university’s multimillion-dollar baby. They are guiding institutions of higher learning in a direction where they never should go.

Sadly, we have little power, it seems, to stop it.

The newsflash came across my iPhone and took me aback. Yes, I had wanted Penn State to rid itself of coach Joe Paterno, but I never thought the Board of Trustees would have the testicular fortitude to do so.

I misjudged the trustees.

“A change was necessary,” John Surma, the vice chair of the board, told the media last night.

Their shakeup Wednesday night was massive and immediate. They weren’t about to let Paterno finish out the season. Along with the university’s president, they terminated the 84-year-old Paterno, fired him, canned him – you pick the verb. But they wanted Paterno to have nothing more to do with the football program in a small Pennsylvania town that he had turned, almost singlehandedly, into national powerhouse.

Yet they couldn’t forgive how he’d ignored his duty: to protect the integrity of the institution. That is an unforgivable sin. For no coach is bigger than the institution. Ask Bob Knight. Ask Bruce Pearl. Ask Mike Leach. Ask Jim Tressell. Just ask any number of college coaches who thought they ran their university simply because they had unparalleled success in the sports arenas.

Soon enough, all these men, successful as they were, discovered they were wrong. Even to the frustration of their adoring legions, these men learned that they couldn’t survive long on wins alone. Wins do matter, but not one bit more than the integrity of the institution.

To prostitute that integrity like a Vegas whore is something no trustee, tasked with safeguarding the institution’s reputation, can overlook. And the trustees at Penn State didn’t.

It didn’t mean much to them that Paterno was an icon and that maybe he’d given more to the university than he’d gotten in return. They can salute him for that; they can praise him for that’ but they must condemn him for not demanding that the university and the State College police throw his sexual predator of an assistant coach under the jail.

In the firestorm since the revelation, Paterno admitted he should have done more, but that’s what coach Jim Tressell said in late May after Ohio State kicked him out the front door.

“I wish I had done more,” Paterno said.

With all the evidence mounting of his complicity in a cover-up, I doubt he could have said much else. Sometimes, however, an apology isn’t enough. Sometimes, an at-the-ready fix just isn’t there to latch on to, because some problems are too broad for a quick fix. What’s been happening at Penn State fits into the latter list.

The trustees knew that better than Paterno’s apologists, hangers-on and sycophants. The trustees listened to the “Keep JoePa On” crowd; they read the police reports; they talked to people around the controversy; they did their due diligence.

They were left, however, with a Hobson’s choice: They couldn’t let a man like Joe Paterno represent their university for one more minute.

“The past several days have been absolutely terrible for the entire Penn State community,” Surma told the media. “But the outrage that we feel is nothing compared to the physical and psychological suffering that allegedly took place.”

Suma is right. The damage done to boys whom a coach abused sexually can never be repaired. What can be repaired is the culture that allowed these heinous crimes to go unreported to authorities, and the repairing started Wednesday night when the trustees looked at the best interest of the university and told Paterno he had to go.

I remember how Woody Hayes lost his job at Ohio State in the winter of ’78. He was chased out of town, kicked aside like a deer’s carcass on the side of Interstate 71 for punching an opposing player.

A stubborn, God-fearing, character-building football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, Hayes had done more good for his players and my alma mater than any university president or athlete or athletic director ever did. So to see his coaching career end like this, on somebody else’s terms, was an embarrassment of the first order.

For Hayes easily could have hung on to his job as long as he wanted it. But a university can only tolerate so much from an iconic coach. It must have its limits, and with one awkward punch, Hayes pushed those limits until they broke.

I mention Hayes here only because of what is happening to Joe Paterno at Penn State.

For all of my adult life, the 84-year-old Paterno has been the face of the Nittany Lions. Players have come and gone in Happy Valley, but Coach Paterno remained a fixture – the tie that bound generations of Penn State football players to one another and to the community. He was all that was good about their program, and about college athletics.

It would be a mistake to say that all the reverence we’ve shown for Paterno was misguided. I surely wouldn’t dare demean Paterno’s contributions to Penn State any more than I demeaned Woody’s after his anger took the measure of him during the waning minutes of a Gator Bowl game against Clemson.

At some point – and Paterno reached his years ago – old coaches lose their edge. They stop looking at the landscape broadly and cocoon themselves into a smaller world, a world where the only things that count are the victories.

Win enough games, and almost anything the old coach does can be excused. Win enough, we name streets for him; we build buildings with his name on the facades; and we name our children for him.

Yes, we’ll do almost anything, and the latter word proves the salient term here. What we won’t do, however, is allow a coach to abuse our boys or abet the abuse of them, which the grand jury testimony that Coach Paterno gave suggests he did.  No one accuses him of molesting anybody’s boy himself, but that’s not the point.

What is the point is this: Paterno refused to be part of the solution, so he, as the man at the top of the flow chart, becomes a part of the problem. This problem was no Tattoo-gate, either; nor was it a public display that embarrassed the university the way Woody’s actions did.

Rather, what happened at Penn State was closeted, hidden from public view and discussion. No one came to the fore to talk about a rogue assistant coach, seemingly content all to let the coach’s criminality disappear amid more Paterno victories and the hoopla that came with success.

But secrets like these don’t stay hidden forever. When they do reveal themselves, they explode like a hydrogen bomb, littering the picturesque landscape with victims and leaving collateral damage in its wake.

I can’t say whether I see Paterno as a victim here of what a trusted assistant did wrong or as a conspirator or simply as collateral damage. I can say he did little to make things better. His silence and his inaction – perhaps the right choice of words here – allowed an evil to go unpunished, and for that lapse alone, he deserved to lose his job.

Paterno deserved to be marched out the front door just as Woody Hayes was when his misconduct became more than the university and its alumni could tolerate, his victories notwithstanding.

Yet this doesn’t mean people should love Joe Paterno less. I know I didn’t love Woody Hayes any less after he lost his job as Ohio State football coach. What this moral lapse does mean is that sometimes an honorable, decent man can lose his bearings, and when he does, he ends up losing something he loved:

The best damn job he ever had.

Last week, the woeful tale of the implosion of the Boston Red Sox morphed into a larger story about sports journalism and the perils of beat reporting. Suddenly, the story of the team’s epic September collapse became a sidebar to the manner in which that story was being told. I’m confident that the Sox ultimately will rebound from this terrible season. But will baseball coverage ever be the same? I’m not so sure.

The Sox last month lost a nine-game lead in the American League wild-card race by playing like chumps. Millions of fans like me were furious. And hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. Last week, dutifully, the Boston Globe published an in-depth piece by investigative reporter Bob Hohler titled “ Inside The Collapse.” The story was unflattering to the team’s manager (who will not be back) and pretty much everyone else. And with good reason.

Here’s the nut graph from Hohler’s piece:

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