Perhaps it was the addition of Busch beer to the dugout cooler Monday night. How else to explain RFT's rise from the valley to the mountaintop?

Fortified in mind, body and AB's tastiest "spirit," Team RFT rallied last night to defeat BS Bar & Grill to the tune of 18-12. The victory marked the first time in three years RFT has defeated the perennial champs and came just a few short weeks after the good guys puked up a 22-1 humiliation-fest to BS to inaugurate the 2008 campaign.

In upping their record to 3-3 on Monday night, the RFTers proved once again that this year they're no longer content to serve as league doormats. The most visible testament to this effect was RFT's steely ace Kevin Powers, who took the mound to face his former team. After suffering through a five-run first inning, Powers settled down and found those rotating rainmakers that have made him the Cy Young of the U. City/Overland rec league three years running. (How and why BS let Powers go remains one of the biggest head-scratchers of the off-season.)

Any statistician worth his scorebook will tell you that the average baseball player peaks around age 30.

Clearly, this is not true for slow pitch softball, as a ''veteran'' (read: downright geriatric in some cases) Grady's Bar team defeated RFT last night 15-10, dropping the alt-weekly squad's 2008 record to 2-3.

Not in this instance, allegedly.

Congratulations to all who had "25 days" in the How Long Will It Take to File a Josh Hancock Wrongful Death Lawsuit Pool.

And kudos to those who singled Newman Bronson & Wallis as the local personal-injury firm.

Pat "We Offered to Call Him a Cab" Shannon's middle-of-the-night phone call to St. Louis police chief Joe Mokwa was what we in the trade like to call a "red flag": Someone was gonna sue Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood in the wake of the fatal drunk-driving misadventure; it was merely a question of who and when.

Along with Mark Bronson, Claude F. Clayton Jr., Keith C. Kantack and J. Kristopher White, all of Tupelo, Mississippi; and S. Ray Hill III, of Oxford, Mississippi, are reportedly listed as representing the plaintiff, Dean Hancock, Josh Hancock's father.

Shannon's has company: Listed as co-defendants are the tow-truck company whose vehicle Hancock's rented SUV plowed into and the driver of the disabled car the tow-truck driver had come to the aid of.

In the Post-Dispatch's story, reporter Heather Ratcliffe quotes the lawsuit as saying:

"The intoxication of Joshua Morgan Hancock on said occasion was involuntary."

-Unreal