Detroit Free Press

CHICAGO -- It was as messy as a bachelor party and as ugly as the hangover, but it counted, it's done, and like the groom-to-be crawling home at sunrise, the Lions wear a small smirk on their faces this morning. The streak is over. The curse is dead. The road is no longer lined with poison bricks. The NFL record they never wanted -- three straight years of road defeats -- is someone else's to break now.

Ten years ago, a woman named Bryl Phillips-Taylor went to Washington to support a ban on assault rifles. Her son, Scott, had been killed with one.Last week, she returned for the same reason. Her son was still dead. The bullets had still come from an assault weapon. But there she was again, pleading the same case.

If you think this means the end of rape, forget it.If you think this means the end of gold digging, forget that, too.If you think the sudden vaporizing of the Kobe Bryant trial means young women will no longer wander starry-eyed into hotel rooms of athletes they just met, wake up.And if you think NBA stars will be more careful about the women they cheat with on the road, well, there's some swampland in New Jersey we'd like to sell you.

By now the U.S. Olympic men's basketball players have put away their bronze medals (deep inside the sock drawer) and probably are wondering why they bothered to go in the first place."One of them told me he felt let down because people back home were rooting against them," Swin Cash, a member of U.S. women's gold-medal team and the Shock, told me.Well, that's a shame. No athlete should sense his country rooting against him. As defenders of this Dream Team have said: "Don't get mad at these guys. They're the ones who gave up their summers."

I have never won an Olympic gold medal, so it is not for me to tell someone what he should do with his. But certain "experts" last week didn't let that stop them. They strongly suggested Paul Hamm, the U.S. Olympic gymnast, should take his gold medal, press it into the chest of his South Korean competitor, and say, "Here, this is yours. You keep it."

How do you eulogize a rival? Joe Falls, a man who did the same job as me for the newspaper that competes with mine, died last week. He lost a long battle with diabetes. He was 76. He couldn't type anymore. He couldn't walk steps. Last year, with a simple, elegant column, he told his many fans good-bye after six decades in the business."It's been a joy," he wrote, "thank you for being there with me."

Ijust returned from a week on a cruise ship, or, as we sailors like to refer to it, "Morrison's Cafeteria."For ...