IT WAS HARD not to be amused last week when Kobe Bryant invoked the sacred concept of family - on and off the court - while receiving the NBA's Most Valuable Player award. Maybe we shouldn't have been surprised. He works in Los Angeles, after all, a city where fiction and reality share the same agent.

Bon voyage: Four years after arriving from Australia, ODU’s 7-foot-3 fan favorite Sam Harris graduates today with a degree in business management before returning home to play in the Aussie pro league. In more ways than one, Sam has completed an important leg of an improbable journey.

If you think our society rushes kids along too quickly, robbing them of their childhood, you won't want to hear this story: Another college basketball coach has offered a scholarship to an eighth-grader. The University of Kentucky's Billy Gillispie recently received a verbal commitment from Michael Avery, a 6-foot-4 guard from Encino, Calif.

Eerily enough, about an hour before the unfortunate filly Eight Belles was euthanized Saturday, I imagined a similar fate for the designers of those absurd Kentucky Derby hats the rich and fashionable women wear at Churchill Downs.

I don't know how college football fans can possibly be downcast about the rejection of a plan to turn the Bowl Championship Series into a four-team playoff. After all, on the same day, the NCAA approved two new bowl games for next season. What more could people ask for? Who hasn't wondered why the Washington, D.C., area doesn't have a bowl to call its own?

Along with complete-game pitchers, heavyweight boxing champions and the Indianapolis 500, the Kentucky Derby belongs to a growing list of sports relics. Can you name one of the horses entered in Saturday's Run for the Roses? It might help to know that another Derby actually is approaching. If you didn't, you're not alone.

Blaine Taylor has every reason to feel a greater fondness for Old Dominion today. The salary and security that come with a seven-year contract extension that's in the works buys a lot of love.

LAUGH RIOT: It was a sign of the times, I guess. When the Olympic torch relay came through San Francisco recently, demonstrators gathered to protest China's human rights record. One person held up a placard that read, "Would we have allowed Nazi Germany to host the Olympics?" Well, actually, we did. Berlin. 1936. Hitler. Jesse Owens. Does any of this ring a bell?

As I write these words, I'm on the clock. One way or another, aren't we all on the clock? Does that mean that life imitates the NFL draft? Just in case it does, let's synchronize our watches. The curtain goes up on the big TV production at 3 p.m. Saturday.

The stupidity of some people is simply breathtaking. What was the marketing staff of the Kansas City T-Bones minor league baseball team thinking when it came up with the idiotic promotion ridiculing Michael Vick's imprisonment at Leavenworth? The team's plan to "welcome" Vick to the neighborhood May 28 was to include prison uniforms, spotlights and escape sirens.