One of the best stories in college lacrosse this year revolved around Bryant College, the Division II program headed by ex-Duke coach Mike Pressler.

It had a Southwest Virginia tie, given Pressler's association with Washington and Lee as a player and with VMI as a coach, but the story remained untold, at least in The Roanoke Times.

For three months, I pursued Pressler, leaving numerous voice messages and e-mails. On top of the Bryant story, I wanted to ask if he felt W&L had turned its back on him when it had an opening last spring.

The process went through the sports information office at Bryant College. It went through his agent. It went through his publisher. It went through his publicist. It even went through an assistant to the publicist, who was on sick leave.

"Mike says he remembers you," I was told at one point.

Pressler played in the famous "Armadillo" game between North Carolina and W&L in 1982, when W&L unveiled a new formation that caused the rules of lacrosse to be rewritten.

I covered the "Armadillo" game. Later, I wrote the story when Pressler leaned back in his chair in the W&L dining hall, at which point the chair collapsed and a wooden spike severed an artery that nearly killed him. Last spring, when the W&L job came open, not too many other reporters called to get Pressler's take on the situation.

As requests for an interview went unanswered, slowly my sympathy turned to scorn.

Maybe "scorn" is a little strong, but somehow I've become less eager to read the book, "It's Not About the Truth," that Pressler co-authored with Sports Illustrated's Don Yeager. Due out today, it deals with the 2006 rape charges against three members of the Duke lacrosse team that led to Pressler's resignation.

Along the way, one of the publicists said she would send me a "review" copy of the book, which so far hasn't arrived.

In the newspaper business, we keep reminding ourselves that nobody cares about our problems, but is anybody else getting tired of Duke, Pressler, and the television newsmagazines that covered the story ad nauseum?

You can be sure that rival lacrosse coaches are furious over the recent NCAA decision to grant an extra year of eligibility to the Duke players who were on the 2006 team when the season was canceled after eight games.

Let's get this straight: Duke canceled the season, not the NCAA, not the ACC.

A player could have blown out his knee after the eighth game and not been eligible for a hardship year, but a school voluntarily ends its season for reasons that subsequently have come into question and that's OK?

I loved the way that the NCAA cited the unanimous vote of the 12 ACC presidents as one of the factors in its decision. Want to know how many of the ACC schools sponsor men's lacrosse teams? Four.

That number was down to three for the second half of the 2006 season, when teams like Virginia might have anticipated a decent gate from a visit from 2005 NCAA runner-up Duke. Not only was the game not played, but Virginia lost the home game and had to go to Duke this year.

What's Duke going to want next, a waiver of the NCAA 12.6-scholarship limit in order to furnish grants to the players who were awarded an extra year?

You know what this reminds me of? Pete Gaudet.

In 1995, when Duke men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski was sidelined following preseason back surgery, Gaudet, then his top aide, took over the team and the Blue Devils went 4-15 over the last 19 games. Rather than have Krzyzewski's record sullied by a 13-18 season, Duke was successful in its appeal to have the 4-15 portion of the record assigned to Gaudet.

The word "gall" comes to mind.

Somewhere, there must be a Gaudet clone that could take the fall for the 2006 men's lacrosse season. Now that the rape charges have been thrown out of court, it's getting harder to blame Pressler, who sat down for a Sunday Night Conversation interview this week on ESPN.

I'm not letting Pressler off the hook, though. What he did this year was nothing short of remarkable, beating No. 1 Lemoyne and taking Bryant, a nine-year program in Smithfield, R.I., to the brink of the four-team Division II playoffs. It was a story worth telling.