It smells like Heaven, and old sandwiches

Tonight was my first full shift at the Boston Globe sports desk, a night filled with taking high school scores, fetching page printouts, and losing a battle against the encroachment of crumbs on the "Hawk" desk.

But it was the greatest night ever.

After my shift finished around 2 a.m., I walked past the amazing pictures of Boston life hanging on the newsroom walls, down the escalator surrounded by snapshots of the old typesetting process, out the doors emblazoned with the gothic "Boston Globe" flag in white and into a night that is too cold for summer. As I walked around the front of the building, I looked up and saw the printing presses humming away inside, behind the two-story glass windows. I stopped.

For five minutes, I watched the newspapers fly through the press, going from giant white rolls to line-smeared beauties, in and out and under and over and ahhhh. It was so beautiful.

I don't know what is going to happen to print, or to all those forest-green-and-gold Boston Globe delivery trucks that pack the left side of the parking lot, but I do know that I've reached the point of no return. I'm no longer the fan of newspapers, I'm part of one — a big one, a proud one. Sure, half of the Globe's main floor is full of empty cubicles where many workers once sat. Yes, the newsroom is dingy, and there's a terrible creak on the part of the floor I have to traverse every time I take the page printouts to the slot editor.

But it's a paper! It has a guy called the "slot" editor! It has photos of Babe Ruth in its sports area! It has the U.S. Open on TV at night! It has crazy old men calling in at 1 a.m. to find out who won the Sox game! It has proofers and reporters and editors and girls who come up from the pressroom around midnight to deliver the first edition, all smudged up and pretty, with its full buffet of the day's news.

A buffet — that's what newspapers were always supposed to be — a one-stop place to find out a little bit of everything going on in life. But today, with specialized sites and up-to-the-minute news, the buffet seems old and outdated.

Think about it: who wants to read a huge, easily crinkled sheet smudged with ink? And who wants to work in a newsroom with a college kid's bylined story from six years ago taped to the side of a computer monitor? Why does it matter what some sports writer says about how Fed won tonight? And does anyone except those drunks from Southie care what the Red Sox score is, enough to not watch the game but then call the sports desk to hear whether Boston won?

I don't know, and I can no longer try to answer those questions, for I am partial to newspapers now. But I do know that I love this buffet of a newspaper. It smells like old sandwiches at the Globe, but to me, it smells like Heaven, too.

I'm not sure whether everyone else would love that hole like I do now, with its old file cabinets full of media guides for every single college and professional team, with its wide-open newsroom that has cubicles and reporters' heads for as far as you can see, with people like Cheryl sitting on the sports copy desk, telling the new "night hawk" (their name for my position) how it is (that people aren't going to stop reading the paper or cancel their subscriptions because the new girl's recording on the Globe's score phone line (617-265-6600, call on Thursdays) sounded dumb to herself), with a proofing printer that the editors hope would have a completion percentage near Tom Brady's, but is actually more like Rex Grossman's (40% — my observation) in spewing out full-page prints of the next day's paper on time.

I'm a fan. I'll take the Globe as it is, from its fight to stay what it used to be to its place on my doorstep every morning. I'll take the cold weather, the actual frost on my windshield on an early September night.

I'll take Boston's mess of roads that still aren't finished, and the cops using my tax dollars by sitting on those roads at two in the morning while some blue-collar guy tacks on a street sign. I'll take the drive home, the way 93 whips you around and shoots you into the city, under the buildings with blinding lights.

They don't even need to pay me. I can't wait to go back.