The local rumor mills, online and on AM radio and in person, have been all a-flutter this past week over the mere hint of possibility, that men’s pro basketball could again be played in Seattle.

The facts: The league took over running the New Orleans Hornets from the team’s fiscally embattled owner. The team’s arena lease could legally be broken after this season.

All else is speculation.

Could MS mogul Steve Ballmer buy the team, move it here, and along the way pickup rights to the SuperSonics logos and trademarks (now held by NBA Properties)?

Maybe.

Also maybe, the league could fold the Hornets. Or sell them to a New Orleans group. Or move ’em to some other town.

Or the whole league could be shut down in a labor dispute next season, for who knows how long.

This day began for me by reading about the 90th anniversary of commercial radio.

It ends for me with thoughts about possibly this city’s greatest radio personality, Dave Niehaus, whose death was announced this evening.

He was the Mariners’ chief announcer for all of the team’s 34 seasons. He was heard on every game the team played with only 101 exceptions.

Most of those rare days off occurred in recent years. While his voice never lost its timbre, he’d become visibly shaky while seen holding his mic on FSN’s pregame telecasts. His quick wit and command of the game had begun to occasionally falter. Longtime listeners (including charter listeners like me) could tell he was in the twilight of his career.

Yet he held on to the very end, to the last regular season game of 2010.

Niehaus was the one thru-line from the Kingdome days to today, from the early years of Al Cowens and Funny Nose Glasses Night to this year’s half season of pitching ace Cliff Lee.

His voice, even when narrating tales of diamond futility, always held the promise of summer. And now it always will.

So David Stern apparently doesn’t know how to run a sports league during a recession. He’s talking openly about letting the NBA’s weaker franchises die. Anything, I suppose, to keep Seattle from getting its rightful due.

The 2010 Seattle Storm have not only become Seattle’s winningest pro team right now.

They didn’t just sweep all three of their playoff rounds and all their home games this year.

For me, they brought back my love of basketball itself.

Two years and change after the men’s pro team was stolen from us, I realized I could like this game again. The passing. The defense. The steals. The miracle shots from seemingly out of nowhere.

The Storm story is a tale of triumph from the wreckage of a civic travesty.

The day after I suggested finding a new name (hence new initials) for “batting practice,” the Class A Brevard County Manatees renamed “BP” to “hitting rehearsal.”

I recently posted a link to marketing guru Garland Pollard’s list of  “brands to bring back.”

Now, the local angle on missing brands.

Pollard’s blog has praised Seattle’s Major League Soccer franchise for wisely keeping the beloved Sounders name.

He’s scolded the retailer formerly known as Federated Department Stores for trashing its beloved regional store names, including The Bon Marche. He’s suggested bringing those back at least in some capacity.

And when the Post-Intelligencer folded as a print daily, Pollard suggested things Hearst bigwigs could do to keep the P-I brand active, beyond a mere Web presence, such as a weekly print paper or magazine. I think that’s still a good idea.

I, of course, have my own faves I’d like brought back:

• If it can ever be determined who (if anyone) owns the trademark rights to Frederick & Nelson, I’d love to see a new store with that storied name. It needn’t be a full line department store. It could just be a quality family clothing store plus a cosmetics counter and a tea room.
• The Rainier and Olympia beer brands currently live in vestigial form, owned by the Pabst marketing company and made by Miller in LA. It’s time they were brought home, perhaps contract-brewed by one or more local microbrewers.
• With Sound Northwest merged out of existence, the region could use a print music mag again. Why not resurrect The Rocket? I can just see gleefully overdesigned cover portraits of today’s Seattle “beard bands.”
• Someone, somewhere, has the bulk of the exhibits from the Jones Fantastic Museum, the beloved carny attraction that used to reside in what’s now the Seattle Center House.
• Heck, for that matter let’s find a place somewhere in town to put up a new Fun Forest. I suggest the former Frederick Cadillac/Teatro ZinZanni block in Belltown, where two humungous condo towers were supposed to rise up before the housing market fell down.
• Speaking of Belltown, this town still needs a restaurant/lounge as fun, as welcoming, and as classlessly classy as the Dog House.
• Compared to most of these fantasized revivals, there’s actually some practical hope for a new Sonics franchise. The money and the management are in place. I’m certain a re-enlarged arena can be conceived with a minimal govt. investment. This leaves only two obstacles—David Stern and the current team owners at whose bidding he serves.

Sonicsgate, the locally made documentary about the theft of Seattle’s oldest pro sports legacy and the locals who aided and abetted it, can now be viewed online in its entirety. And here’s (most of) ESPN’s Outside the Lines episode about the sad saga, which does a decent job of summarizing the main tragic plotlines.

• Curling really is the greatest game of all time.
• Apolo Anton Ohno is in line to replace the disgraced Tiger Woods as the champion all-around ad spokesman for everything. This does not, however, mean anyone will care about speed skating until the next Winter Games.
• I can see why the Intl. Olympic Committee chose to add more “x-treme-y” events and not to add women’s ski jumping. Why simply stick on an extension to a legacy Olympic sport when you can instead grow your young, hip, edgy, more marketable side?
• The whole thang’s already a fiscal disaster for the Vancouver and B.C. governments. But the province’s zeal in attracting the Games is understandable if you know how it works. Over recent decades, successive provincial leaders have staked their political careers on “megaprojects,” big govt.-subsidized development schemes that invariably funnel money from the taxpayers to politically-connected landowners and construction firms. The Olympics are simply the biggest, costliest megaproject of them all.
• NBC’s coverage sucks because the network’s stuck in a coverage model invented decades ago by ABC sports exec Roone Arledge. He operated from the premise that too few Americans intrinsically cared about these sports, so instead he’d put on a drama serial. Pretaped profile pieces turned these athletes into instant celebrities (even if, in real life, they were often bland workaholics). Armies of videotape editors would slice-n’-dice the competition footage into “shows,” carefully timed to draw and keep the biggest possible mass audience for the longest possible viewing time. But we’re not in the three-network era anymore. In the age of cable + Internet, audiences are fragmented into little pieces based on shared intense interest—such as those who are intensely interested in winter sports. The more you care about any of these events, the more you’re disgusted by what U.S. TV does to them.

That hoped-for big south-O-the-border business boost from the Vancouver Olympics? Not gonna happen, probably.

Twenty-four years after Expo 86, Vancouver BC is getting ready for another “world class” mega-event. This time, as Sports Illustrated reports, many “people in Vancouver are dreading Games.”

MISCmedia is dedicated today to Bob Blackburn, the original voice of the Seattle Supersonics, who passed on today at age 83. He’d outlived the team that had fired him in the early 1990s, then ceremonially retired his microphone. Survivors include son Bob Jr., who performed in several Seattle rock bands as well as serving as his dad’s broadcast assistant. (He’s now in Florida and producing “podcast” Internet radio shows.)

Let’s close this with Blackburn pere‘s longtime closing line to his KIRO-AM sports reports:

This is Bob Blackburn, reminding you that sportsmanship is a part of our American tradition. Be a good sport, whatever you do. So long.

Alaska Airlines is sponsoring an official fan site for Belltown’s own Olympic speed-skating champ, Apolo Anton Ohno. The site’s name, “followapolo.com,” reminded me of this novelty classic.

Mayor Mike McGinn takes office today. He’s released the results of his online call for citizens’ ideas for Seattle. In this highly unscientific poll, more people want a legal nude beach than want another NBA team. (The top request: more transit.)

Seattle’s first TV station, KSRC-TV (soon to become KING-TV) signed on for the first time on Thanksgiving 1948. The debut telecast was a live high school football game, from the then-new (and apparently now doomed) High School Memorial Stadium.

In honor of this occasion, Feliks Banel offers a list of Seattle’s 25 most memorable live TV moments. In chronological order, they begin with that first local telecast and end with the Pike Place Market’s centennial concert on the Seattle Channel. In between are the first and last J.P. Patches shows, Mt. St. Helens, the Kingdome implosion, the WTO protests, and Cobain on Saturday Night Live.

Banel didn’t include, but I would’ve, the Seattle World’s Fair opening (KING, 1962), the last hour of the Dog House restaurant (KCTS, 1994), the weird Jay Leno-hosted party at the Microsoft campus for the launch of Windows 95 (KOMO, KING and KIRO, 1995), the Sonics’ final game (FSN, 2008), and perhaps one or two particularly naughty cable access shows.

With the Fun Forest going away, City officials now have their sights on the other part of Seattle Center they’ve long wanted to remove, High School Memorial Stadium.

Now, the City and the School District have a tentative pact to tear down the stadium and replace it with an underground parking garage, a “great lawn” (with the Olympic Sculpture Park nearby, do we really need another of those?), and a newer but smaller stadium.

Memorial Stadium is one reason the 1962 World’s Fair turned a profit, when later fairs in other cities didn’t. The fair reused several existing buildings—an armory (Center House), a civic auditorium (McCaw Hall), an ice arena (Mercer Arena), and Memorial Stadium (built in 1947, and named to honor the local WWII dead). The fair’s opening and closing ceremonies were held there. A temporary water-filled trench was put in on the football field, and used for boat races.

The stadium, designed in Truman-era military/stoic public architecture and already 15 years old at the time of the fair, already looked decrepit by the ’70s. All the civic planning pundits (especially those without kids in the public schools, which is most of them) have wanted it outta there, replaced by something more high-culture-y.

But the school district needs a neutral-turf site for football and soccer games. And it really needs the revenue it gets from the stadium’s surface parking lot.

So far, nobody’s talking officially about what the City and the school district agreed to. The here-linked SeaTimes story speculates it might include an all-new high school where the Mercer Garage is now, just north of the Center grounds.

As one whose longtime friends include a lot of parents of school kids, I think that would be great. It’d be concrete evidence that this city does indeed care about kids. It would also encourage more families with kids within the greater central-city core.