People are always asking (OK, maybe once a month, but still) how long it takes to write a column. Sometimes, it takes 50 minutes. No lie. Start to finish.* Especially when a game ends at 9:30 p.m. and my column deadline is 10:30 p.m. and I have the look of a guy whose wife's water just broke in the eighth inning of a no-hitter and he's having to make decisions that no man should have to make. It gets ugly on deadline sometimes. Things are said. Computers are banged against countertops, or possibly other reporters. Internet connections are cursed. If you're dating a sportswriter -- and really, why wouldn't you be? -- you don't really even know the person until you see them working on deadline. Not good. It's like that episode of "Friends," where Ross tries to convince everyone that the guy Rachel is dating (Ben Stiller) has a terrible temper, but no one believes him until they walk in on him screaming at the chick and the duck and the goose, or whatever animals Joey had in his apartment. That would be me trying to make a deadline, Captain Insano.

*And that includes the time when I'm pacing, guzzling Red Bull or snorting coffee grounds. Hey, they're my performance-enhancing drugs of choice.

On the other side of things, though, some columns take a long time. I've probably spent 40 hours starting at a computer, writing and re-writing, for one column. The more in-depth, feature stuff. You're probably thinking, "I've never read anything of Matt's that should have taken more than a lunch break," and you're probably right, but once you do 10 or 12 interviews for a big story, you have dozens of pages of notes and a couple different digital recorders with interviews on them, and of course none of it is organized. Heck, if we could organize we'd have actual jobs with responsibility, not ones where we're paid to spill mustard on our 10-year-old dress shirt while watching a football game.

I mention this because this week I wrote a column about the Fresno State women's golf team, and more specifically Chelsea Czinski, the No. 5 golfer. The back story is that last year the Bulldogs had a golfer named Jennifer Shipley. She was a sophomore. She was good. She was all-WAC. She shot a 64 at some tournament in Las Vegas, which you and I will never ever ever do. There are probably pro golfers who've never shot 64. And then she quit. Just like that. Last August. It was so strange, her teammates and coach still aren't sure what happened. The weirdest part wasn't that she quit, it was that she did it so publically, sending out an announcement to the media, claiming there had been "mistreatment." It seems everyone she talked to she gave a different reason, so no one is quite sure of the truth. This spring, her boyfriend quit the men's golf team. Now, I'm told, she goes to school and works at Ann Taylor, which this blog has always considered a clothing store for middle-aged women, but what do I know? Maybe it's all teenagers in Ann Taylor.

Fresno State coach Angie Cates thought Czinski could be the No. 5 golfer. Somebody had to. Czinski was a freshman, but she had talent and she'd gone to the fancy academy down in Florida for training. Well all fall the role of No. 5 got passed around a lot, and everyone pretty much stunk. Czinski did not come through at all in the fall. The Bulldogs No. 5 golfer was sometimes shooting in the high 80s, or worse, which puts a lot of pressure on your top four because they know if they blow up and shoot 83, it's probably going to be a score that counts. We don't need to revisit the entire story, since you can -- and should! -- very well read the column yourself.

The story of this spring was that Czinski got a good talking to by Cates* right before Christmas break and she absolutely delivered. And the day after I wrote a column about it, Day 2 of the WAC Tournament, she shot her best round of her short career and the Bulldogs won their first WAC title. Cates now has more outright WAC titles than Fresno State football coach Pat Hill, a fact I will definitely have to remind him of the next time I want to spoil his good mood. The things I prelude almost never play out the way I insinuate they might, so it was nice to see, for me. Because it's all about me, apparently. The coolest part was that the top four all played great, so Czinski's round technically didn't even count. She played her role perfectly, the unsung No. 5. I think she shot a 76, which is great since all they've ever asked is for her to shoot in the 70s.

*Angie Cates might be the nicest person I've ever met, not including my mother. During the WAC Tournament she gave me the candy bar out of her sack lunch because her mother was in town and they were going to Angie's second wedding dress fitting. She gets married this summer. The first time, apparently, the dress was a touch tight, which is hard to believe because she's so little, but it was, and so she'd been cutting back on the sweets. You've got to have a great sense of humor to tell a columnist with a blog that kind of information. Anyway, I always accidentally call her "Phoebe," you know, because of Phoebe Cates the actress. I did it twice while interviewing Fresno State golfers and neither of them had any idea who Phoebe Cates was. I'm officially older than the Pyramids.

The point of this blog post, I think, was to explain that the Czinski column took longer than my taxes. I don't know why. It just did. The tourney ended at sometime around 3 p.m. and at 10 p.m. I was still struggling. Words were caught in my spleen or something. And usually that means I didn't do enough interviews or find enough interesting tidbits, but I had plenty. I spent the entire day with Czinski's parents, a massive Polish man with a bad knee and a little Japanese woman, and they were absolutely fantastic. Super down-to-earth people, not the parents I expected of a girl who'd attended a fancy golf school in Florida. They said they wanted to invest in their daughter, for her, and I believed them.

Maybe I should invest in a ghost writer who can type faster.