On any given Friday or Saturday night, you can join the cool kids from middle school once again. For $6.25 or less, don the brown and orange skates of yore and cut loose to the sounds of Cheap Trick, Vanilla Ice and J. Lo. You might even catch sight of a staffer or two clinging to the wall for stability and jealously eyeing the preteen speed-skaters. It's a helluva good workout (you'll realize how good when the aches hit the day after), and fret not, the Lucky Number game, the races and the Couple Skate live on here. Lace up and roll out.

Short of building a half-pipe or draining the pool in your own back yard, there aren't too many places anymore to skateboard in Dallas without needing a police lookout. Eisenbergs has the best layout for practicing anything from an ollie to a trick from Dogtown & Z-Boys. The park also offers amazing graffiti, live music, ramps for bikes, blades and boards and a reasonable admission fee. Parents can feel comfortable dropping the kids off or donning a pair of Etnies and trying it themselves...don't worry, they rent out helmets and kneepads.

Dallas isn't exactly a walking city known for sweeping waterfront vistas or any vistas for that matter. So, ho-hum, here we go again with The Rock--but you got a better answer? Didn't think so. White Rock Lake is a perennial Best Of favorite and deservedly so. More than 11 miles of biking and jogging trails surround this 1,000-acre lake, a group called "For the Love of the Lake" says. You have a view of the lake, parks, other bikers and other joggers. It is far and away the best place to run away from the city.

This is the Sears of sports stuff. Solidly middle market, serviceable and so wide-ranging it's impossible not to find something in your sport of choice. Although Oshman's isn't the place for upper-end specialty gear, at times you can find the very best of what you're looking for at bargain prices. A few months ago, we found a pair of North Face climbing shorts for an unheard-of 40 percent off. The tennis gear, too, is top of the line. Whether you are looking for clothing, a set of weights, a soccer ball or a very good tennis racket, you have a good chance of ending your hunt here.

Don't get us wrong. We love quite a number of Dallas' outdoor boutiques, the ones selling full lines of Patagonia fashions and some of the coolest shoes known to man. But when it comes time to spring for a serviceable sleeping bag or a backpack, REI's prices and selection are the ones to beat. A few years back we bought some first-rate North Face bags, and nobody could top this warehouse-sized, outdoor category killer. And that didn't include the 10 percent year-end refund, which goes along with the co-op-style way REI does business. Some of the fine, high-end outfitting stores in the area are more likely to meet the demands of back-country winter hikers or rated mountaineers. But for all-around outfitting and camping stuff for the whole family, REI gets the nod.

This may not be the biggest bicycle store in the city, but it is definitely the best place for a serious bicyclist to find equipment and expert advice. The Seattle-based retailer has built a reputation for quality outdoor equipment and carries a good variety of bikes and biking gear suited for the spandex set. They carry clothing for biking in the heat, for wet weather and cold weather, gear more suited to Northern climes, bicycle racks and camping equipment. The staff is knowledgeable and incredibly helpful to novice and expert alike. Besides biking, you can pick up food, gadgets and gear to help you climb mountains someplace outside Texas. And, if your privates hurt when you bike, they have seats that will fix that. We were thankful.

This one was tough. As you'd imagine, there are plenty of worthy candidates on a team that was out of the A.L. West pennant race shortly after returning from spring training. Or was it shortly before heading to spring training? Well, whatever. Palmeiro beat out John Rocker, Carl Everett and Hideki Irabu--all solid additions to the club if you ask us. Despite being just two years shy of his 40th birthday, Palmeiro put up some pretty impressive power numbers this season and managed to maintain his sanity in a clubhouse that went the way of Big Nurse's Cuckoo Ward months (if not years) ago. And if that wasn't good enough, well, the man is in a Viagra commercial. 'Nough said.

If it's anything other than, "It makes me wish television had never been invented," no need to check their pay stub.

Swear to God we didn't want to do this again, especially since we're conflicted now that Mike Rhyner, Gordon Keith and Dave Lane are (very infrequent) contributors to these pages. But what the f-bomb. After all, what other local radio station carries every single sports-related news conference live, in its entirety? Where else can you find a suicidal (fake) Jerry Jones begging, "No funeral," the day after his Cowboys lost to the Houston Texans? Where else can you find Michael Irvin and Troy Aikman each week during football season, willing to dish out a few hard knocks of their own? And where else can you find the Overcusser, who will foul-mouth a millionaire jock to death to see whether he will fight through it or join in the fun? The Ticket gets it (big time--right, Jerry), commingling sports-talk with a little entertainment news (what's the dif?) and other effluvia geared toward men but attracting a sizable audience of women as well; it's guys' night out all the time, and so be it. We're partial to Dunham and Miller and The Hardline--and, frankly, we're vying for our own 7-11 p.m. show, because we wanna get stuck in that revolving door--and are coming around to BAD Radio, which isn't so, well, bad. And we know your dad loves Norm, but he creeps us out just a little bit.

Seriously, you come up with someone better. Lord knows we tried, but every time someone crops up we sorta dig, they skip town--and we know Dale couldn't crawl anywhere, much less skip. Frankly, we wanted to give this to Steve Atkinson, but now that he done moved we're stuck with that Stuart Scott starter kit on 'FAA; look, man, you are not funny. Don't get us started on the guys at Channel 5--it's called humility, Newy, look into it--and Mike D. at Fox might be the "best in the game," only we don't play by those rules. So we're stuck with Dale, the richest man in local sports--A-Rod excepted--and certainly the man with the richest blood stream; dude looks like an éclair these days. But we could do worse than get saddled with a cranky, cagey veteran who's sick to death of being sick to death of disingenuous owners, spoiled-brat players and lousy teams that still overachieve (the Cowboys should have been 2-14 last season, face it) despite having no talent, drive, ambition, discipline, younameit. And how can you not love a guy willing to stick it to Mark Cuban, the only guy with worse hair than Dale? Cuban's got the winning team, for God's sake, and still Dale won't play dead for the guy; Cuban's got balls of gold (24 carat, says his jeweler), Hansen's got balls of steel. In his head.