A League

Ed Davis, who is 35, just can't get soccer out of his blood. The Elkridge resident played at Old Mill High School and then at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is now an assistant coach at Old Mill. Davis' day job as a mortgage broker puts him at his desk at 8 a.m., but soccer explains why Davis was in a Jessup industrial area at nearly 11 p.m. Wednesday, talking with friends, watching and getting ready for yet another game in La Liga. La Liga, named after Spain's renowned pro league, was formed when Soccer Dome Inc. opened in late 2003.

Christmas lights may adorn many houses at the moment and snow may be on the way, but it is still lacrosse season - indoor lacrosse, that is. A fixture for many Howard County players, indoor lacrosse is, paradoxically, a faster, more demanding version of the outdoor game, but one with room for fun, experimenting and a chance to work on that left-handed shot. Many county players - whether they are on club-level travel teams or high school teams - play in the Maryland Indoor Lacrosse League, which uses the indoor fields at the Owings Mills Sports Arena, Perring Athletic Club in Parkville and the newly opened Bare Hills Athletic Club in North Baltimore's Mount Washington neighborhood.

With little to lose and much to gain, the New York Giants yesterday asked rookie quarterback Eli Manning to save their season. Or were they telling him to get a jump-start on next year? The answer probably lies somewhere between those two realities. No sooner had Giants coach Tom Coughlin demoted veteran Kurt Warner than he proclaimed the future has arrived in Week 11. "He is the future of the New York Giants," Coughlin said after naming Manning the starter for Sunday's game against the Atlanta Falcons.

PHILADELPHIA -- Phillies first baseman Jim Thome looks back at a difficult spring and wonders, like everyone else, how he got from there to here. There was the broken fingertip in March that cast the early part of his 2004 season in doubt. Then he sprained his left hand making a tag in April and strained a ligament in his right index finger just for bad measure. If hitting is all in the hands, Thome and the Phillies had no right to expect him to keep putting up the kind of offensive numbers that have long made him one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball, and yet he has done that and more.

Regardless of how old you are, chances are good that you can find opportunities to play team and individual sports in Howard County. The following is a list of county facilities and groups involved in amateur athletics. Note that many groups maintain Web sites, and some use them exclusively to field inquiries from newcomers. County Department of Recreation and Parks The agency has the best overview of the county's competitive scene. The department produces widely read, seasonal listings of all its activities, from sports to trips to classes.

McCormick & Schmick is known most days for its seafood, but this time of year its menu more resembles that of an Irish pub. In celebration of St. Patrick's Day tomorrow, the Inner Harbor restaurant brings in Irish steppers and adds corned beef and cabbage, shepherd's pie, bangers and mash, and mussels steamed in Guinness beer to the menu. "In our company, St. Patrick's Day has become like a national holiday," general manager Kevin Bonner said. Once celebrated most widely in Irish enclaves such as Boston, St. Patrick's Day is becoming more mainstream - and more commercial.

Kristie Zeiler - tall, slender and a student of ice dancing and figure skating for 10 years - swept in from the ice at the Mount Pleasant Ice Arena yesterday morning. Blades flashing, she glided gracefully up to the wall, threw first one leg, then the other across the barrier and rolled over like a lumberjack clambering over a downed spruce. It's not a move she learned in ice dancing. But then Zeiler, 19, of Rosedale, wasn't wearing her figure skates. She and her sisters Megan, 15, and Allissa, 13, and 25 other girls were competing against eight other teams in Baltimore Youth Hockey's first all-girl "PonyTail Tournament," played at three area rinks.

Princeton associate coach David Metzbower is considered one of the top offensive minds in lacrosse, but even he is apt to listen to the occasional suggestion from Tigers senior attackman Ryan Boyle. Sometimes, he has no choice. There are mornings when Boyle will burst into Metzbower's office, just dying to tell the coach of his latest idea on how to beat a defense. And in video sessions, Boyle's acute analysis can be dizzying to the rest of his teammates. "Ryan will come in and he'll have a slew of plays that he probably thought of in his sleep," said Tigers junior attackman Jason Doneger.

Of the 16,700 men who have worn a Major League baseball uniform, 141 were Jewish. Who knew? That's the question Martin Abramowitz pondered four years ago while sitting with his son at the kitchen table, looking at his incomplete collection of baseball cards depicting Jewish players. To his father's lament of the cards that never were, 11-year-old Jacob offered simple advice: "Make your own." With that, Abramowitz began a search that took him from a Chicago basement to dusty courthouse records to document "American Jews in America's Game," a set of baseball cards that goes on sale next week.