Every once in a while we have to be told to "slow down, you are going too fast; stop and think." Sometimes it is a speeding accident, or an exciting idea gone wrong, or a personal excess that should be controlled.

In Ireland's case it was the soaring economy, leaping home prices, and, in the face of free-flowing money, the rushing greed of more than a few Irish to get their shares.

Baseball has long carried the day when it comes to locutions that insiders and true fans use as a second language - the hot corner, a can of corn, the cycle, suicide squeeze, ribbie, Ks, the nickel curve, and the slider, to name just a few. Then there's the Hot Stove League, which for me conjures up a long-ago scene in an up-country general store where fans gathered around the warm central stove to swap baseball stories and promote a trade or two for the off-season.

Tom Martin took to ice as a young boy as cod take to the sea. It was his lifeblood. In high school, he used to run to his Cambridge home backwards from Harvard Square, practicing the art of a pivot so he could perform the difficult maneuver without hesitation on ice.

"I was just a dog," he says of his workouts that led to star status in hockey at Boston College and on the 1964 US Olympic Team at Innsbruck.