During D.C. United’s video session Friday morning, captain Dax McCarty was more talkative and animated than usual. McCarty, a 5-foot-7 feisty midfielder, is always a bundle of energy, but with his former club, FC Dallas, in town for Saturday’s match, his anticipation was heightened.

“He was very chatty because he knows everything about them,” teammate Chris Pontius said. “He knows how to break them down, which is good for us. He knows what makes them work. I know he wants to go out and perform well.”

He started playing basketball when he was 5 and has coached since age 23.

Friday at Comcast Center, Maryland Coach Gary Williams said goodbye to the game that has been his life’s passion and sole professional calling amid glowing tributes, standing ovations and chants of “Gar-Ree! Gar-Ree!” and “Four more years!”

Williams’s eyes filled with tears before he uttered his first word from the platform erected on the court for the occasion — part news conference, part celebration of his 22-year tenure at Maryland, which he led to a national championship in 2002. And he paused mid-sentence several times, determined to keep those welling tears in check as he thanked students, fans, administrators and players past and present for their support over the years, calling himself as a fortunate man who “has had [his] time.”

This is Steve Buckhantz’s college ID from James Madison. It’s also amazing. It comes via the JMU Sports Blog, and it reminds me, there are images every week that maybe don’t deserve a full post but certainly deserve a moment’s recognition. And so, this post is for them. Starting with:

Yup, that’s Mike Green, lifting a cold one into the air while swaying along with a Bon Jovi tribute band on Thursday night, 24 hours after the Caps’ season ended. I don’t think anyone would expect the Caps to lock themselves into solitary cells and cry tears of anguish for their season, but jeez, he looks really happy, doesn’t he? The full video, courtesy John Erskine, is here.

MIAMI — First came a flurry of strikeouts from the Washington Nationals’ bullpen. Next, the relief corps pulled off two narrow escapes.

Three relievers combined to pitch four scoreless innings Friday night, and the Nationals broke a three-game losing streak by beating the Florida Marlins 3-2 in 10 innings.

Tyler Clippard struck out all six batters he faced in the seventh and eighth. Drew Storen retired Mike Stanton on a 400-foot flyout to end the ninth, then teamed with Sean Burnett to wiggle out of a jam in the 10th.

MIAMI — Trailing by a run in the 10th inning, the Florida Marlins were on the verge of another comeback when they put runners at the corners with none out.

This time they failed to come up with the big hit. The next three batters were retired, and Florida lost to the Washington Nationals 3-2 Friday night.

The Marlins have lost consecutive games for the first time since April 10-12. They fell to 8-4 in one-run games.

Arthur Laurents, an irascible eminence of musical theater and movies out of whose typewriter came the stage scripts for “West Side Story,” “Gypsy” and the three-hanky film romance “The Way We Were,” died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93 and had pneumonia.

In a show-business career that spanned eight decades, Mr. Laurents wrote radio dramas, Broadway plays and novels. Besides “The Way We Were” (1973), his film credits included Alfred Hitchcock’s thrill-kill melodrama “Rope” (1948) and the acclaimed ballet drama “The Turning Point” (1977). He was a sought-after director for the stage as well, and continued to direct into his 90s.

“Friday Night Lights” already came to a close on DirecTV and on DVD. But the final episodes of the Dillon, Tex., drama are now airing on NBC. And that means it’s time to bid the final-for-real farewells by assessing each installment shortly after it airs on the Peacock network every Friday at 8 p.m. EST. Why? Because “Clear eyes. Full hearts. Must blog.” Or, um, something like that.

In what was, arguably, the best “Friday Night Lights” episode so far in this final season (or final season redux, if you’ve already watched), Luke Cafferty turned into Mr. Uber-Confident; Vince Howard tried to lay down the law with his father and his lady; Buddy Garrity learned that being a dad sometimes means helping your son upchuck into a trash can after he broke into your bar to drink in the middle of the day; and Epyck proved that even troubled students are totally down with a school-sponsored luau.

James E. Cronin, a retired history professor at Montgomery College who served for eight years on the Montgomery County school board, died April 26 at his home in Silver Spring of complications from cancer. He was 69.

Dr. Cronin joined the Montgomery College faculty in 1970 and taught on the Rockville campus until his retirement in 2006. He served twice as chair of the history and political science department, from 1988 to 1992 and from 2002 to 2005.

He won several awards for his contributions to the school, including recognition for outstanding faculty performance in 2005.

Between the rash of rainouts and adjusting to pitchers standing three feet further away from home plate, several area softball players and coaches have lamented this year’s softball season had yet to hit its stride.

Top-ranked Northern and No. 5 O’Connell did their best Friday to bring it up to speed.

Tayler Schaefer’s sacrifice fly with one out in the bottom of the ninth inning plated Danni Cummings with the winning run in a 2-1 Northern victory to stretch the three-time-defending Maryland 3A champion’s winning streak to 22 games.

Park View players had waited more than a month to exact revenge on rival Broad Run, which handed the Patriots their only loss this season on April 1.

An hour-long lightning delay forced them to wait even longer to get another shot at the eighth-ranked Spartans on Friday night, but after the extended holdup Park View avenged the loss, overcoming an early deficit to hand Broad Run its first defeat of the year with a 4-2 win in Sterling.

Angel Acevedo’s side volley 13 minutes into the second half gave Park View the deciding tally, a worthy result for a skilled Patriots team that relentlessly attacked Broad Run (10-1, 10-1 Virginia AA Dulles District).

There’s something about top-ranked teams that doesn’t sit well with Chantilly junior forward Morgan Morris. Chantilly has been in that position before, reaching the top spot late last April, and even claiming the Virginia AAA title in 2009.

But after a slow start to this season, the Chargers have yet to reach the top spot, though they have played the No. 1 team twice in the past two weeks. And each time, the result has been the same: a Chantilly win.

The second such toppling came on Friday night when the fifth-ranked Chargers handed Concorde District foe Centreville its first loss of the season, a fast-paced 1-0 win in Chantilly.

James E. Cronin, a retired history professor at Montgomery College who served for eight years on the Montgomery County school board, died April 26 at his home in Silver Spring of complications from cancer. He was 69.

Dr. Cronin joined the Montgomery College faculty in 1970 and taught on the Rockville campus until his retirement in 2006. He served twice as chair of the history and political science department, from 1988 to 1992 and from 2002 to 2005.

He won several awards for his contributions to the school, including recognition for outstanding faculty performance in 2005.

T

he old gym at Fort Myer wasn’t much to look at. Even after you were in your seat, you wondered if college teams played there. Those that did, such as American University and George Washington, were sometimes good, never great. But it was the place where plenty of people got their break in the shallow end of the big time, such as Gary Williams.

As soon as you first saw Williams, coaching AU from 1978 to 1982, you knew he was destined for great things. Or else, for a padded room. He was crazy. Good crazy.

Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Have you asked him? “I’m not sure why you tell me this, or how I’m supposed to respond.” If there’s a call for more, you can go on: “I don’t want to be a nag, but I also worry that you don’t know how to eat well or say no to yourself. What role do you want me in?”

There’s no right answer here — he could ask you to help him, or he could ask you not to be anything weight-loss related, just loving spouse. I can argue for either one as beneficial to a weight-loss campaign. He might also not be sure what he’s asking — thus the burger bulletins — and talking it through could help you both.

Four score and seven years ago, Washington won the World Series. Yes, that really happened, in a long-gone place called Griffith Stadium, where the air was perfumed with cigar smoke and the good smells emanating from a bakery up near where Florida and Georgia avenues meet. It happened in 1924, when Calvin Coolidge was president and Babe Ruth played for the Yankees. Perhaps it will never happen again. We can live with that in Washington. In some places, they can’t.

This week Washington ended another heartbreaking flirtation with greatness as our highly regarded hockey team was defeated in the playoffs once more — four straight games and out in the second round. One sports commentator, trying to put her finger on the Washington Capitals’ perennial postseason failures, alluded to something perhaps missing in the locker room: an elan, a spark. Or perhaps what was lacking was the sense of sheer desperation that might cause members of a team to think, as one, that they will be forever disgraced and reviled if they lose this game.

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — The circumstances of the previous three days had confined Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen to the bullpen, which reduced two of the Washington Nationals’ most potent weapons to spectators. They watched again for the first six innings Friday night, as tension built at Sun Life Stadium, while their teammates, flaws and all, created a situation worthy of their talents.

Finally given a chance, Clippard and Storen — with a game-ending cameo by Sean Burnett — helped wipe away three miserable days in Philadelphia and lift the Nationals to a 3-2, 10-inning victory over the Florida Marlins before 15,325. The Nationals’ offense — despite striking out 17 times — scraped together the game-winning run when Adam LaRoche lofted a sacrifice fly to left field to score Jayson Werth.

Eds: Updates with comment from Madonna’s publicist. Adds details. Revises

LOS ANGELES — The Kabbalah Centre, a proponent of Jewish mysticism that has attracted Madonna and other celebrities, said Friday it will cooperate with a government tax investigation.

The nonprofit Los Angeles-based center and one of its charities, Spirituality for Kids, received federal government subpoenas concerning tax-related issues, the center said in a statement.

TEHRAN — Several associates of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s closest adviser have been arrested in the past few days, Iranian Web sites reported Friday.

Among them is the cleric who leads the prayers at the presidential mosque, Abbas Amirifar, as well as a person accused of sorcery, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

The arrests follow increasing pressure by clerics, politicians and commanders on Ahmadinejad to cut ties with Esfandiar Rahim Mashaee, the closest adviser of the president, but a man hated by Iran’s clerics for advocating the importance of Iranian culture over Islamic tenets.

MOSCOW — Less than a year before the presidential election, with the country ruled in deep secrecy, political discourse has been reduced to parsing every remark by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for signs of their intentions.

Neither has said whether he will run, but the exercise has produced a lively political horse race, with one sounding presidential and a certain candidate one week, only to fall victim to a barbed comment from the other and lag behind, out of the running, the next.

When 19 horses charge from the gate Saturday in the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby, it will mark the start of what — even in a down year — can still be called the two most exciting minutes in all of sports.

But the reality of the 2011 Derby is the horse that isn’t in the race might be a bigger story than the ones that are.

That could change, of course. The winner might emerge as a star, a horse capable of winning the Preakness Stakes in two weeks and competing for the Belmont in June, and give a niche sport some much-needed buzz. But that could also be wishful thinking. When Uncle Mo was scratched on Friday morning with a mysterious internal illness, it marked the third straight year the most talented horse in the field didn’t make it to the starting gate.

Illegal immigrants in Northern Virginia knew where to go if they needed a high-quality fake green card or Social Security card: They found Eulalio A. Cruz.

From his Manassas home, Cruz, 33, sent cellphone photos of customers to his computer. He’d add addresses and birth dates, used the right kind of ink, and printed the fakes on card stock with holographic images. Sets of documents went for $120 a pop. He’d use a series of runners to make the exchanges.

Federal immigration officials say that Cruz, who this week pleaded guilty to racketeering in federal court in Richmond, was a key player in one of the largest and most sophisticated document mills they have uncovered. His Manassas operation was part of 19 that ran in 11 states, stretching from Nashville to Providence, R.I., officials said. Each year, the ring produced between 10,000 and 15,000 fake documents. They wired at least $1 million to the bosses in Mexico.

The U.S. Senate has a gang problem.

To tackle immigration, senators formed a Gang of 12. On energy policy, they tried a Gang of 10 ( which became a Gang of 20). Now, under pressure to lower the national debt, Congress is waiting for a bipartisan plan from a Gang of Six.

Those are the gangs. This is the problem: Often, they don’t work.

As Barack Obama neared the Democratic presidential nomination in March 2008, he delivered an address dubbed “Renewing the American Economy.” The financial meltdown was still on the horizon, but he pointedly noted that most Americans were in the midst of a long economic slide that he said he would reverse if he were elected.

“For many Americans, the economy has effectively been in recession for the past seven years,” he said in the speech, delivered at Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan. He added, “Americans are working harder for less.”

It seemed an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to U.S. intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend.

Where have you been? inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?

Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”

In his first hire as George Washington’s athletic director, Patrick Nero selected Mike Lonergan to become the next Colonials men’s basketball coach. Nero announced the hiring on a conference call to reporters Friday evening.

“We had terrific pool of candidates,” Nero said. “In the end, we’re very excited that Mike will be joining us and excited for the seasons ahead with Mike.”

It’s a homecoming for Lonergan, 45, who grew up in Bowie and graduated from Carroll High School and Catholic University.

T

he old gym at Fort Myer wasn’t much to look at. Even after you were in your seat, you wondered if college teams played there. Those that did, such as American University and George Washington, were sometimes good, never great. But it was the place where plenty of people got their break in the shallow end of the big time, such as Gary Williams.

As soon as you first saw Williams, coaching AU from 1978 to 1982, you knew he was destined for great things. Or else, for a padded room. He was crazy. Good crazy.

Bruce Boudreau’s below-average playoff record of 17-20 (.459) keeps being used as evidence for his firing as the Washington Capitals’ coach, which makes perfect sense when you learn Scotty Bowman started 28-30 (.483), Al Arbour began 12-15 (.444) and Glen Sather was a lousy 12-25 (.324) to begin in Edmonton.

Why their respective teams hung on to those bums made no sense, putting aside the combined 17 Stanley Cups they won.

The Capitals’ problem is not the coach. That’s not why they got swept in the second round against an, on paper, underwhelming Tampa Bay club.

Paint Branch has tapped Rochelle Coleman to take over its girls’ basketball program, elevating a former assistant who is also one of the best players to come out of the Burtonsville school.

Coleman, a 2001 Paint Branch graduate, was an All-Met as a senior, when she led the Panthers to a state title. She left school as the Panthers’ career scoring leader before playing collegiately at Syracuse and professionally in the Netherlands. Coleman replaces Dan Feher, who took over for Heather Podosek prior to last season.

Three years ago the Atlantic Monthly published an article under the byline “Professor X,” in which the pseudonymous author lamented the widespread assumption that every American should aspire to a college education. He (the pronoun used on the dust jacket) taught and still teaches adult night classes in writing and literature at a community college and a small private college. He argued that most of the students under his tutelage were there not out of a genuine desire to learn at a college level but because some degree of “higher” education is often required of people seeking jobs — highway patrolman, nurse, fireman — for which a liberal arts college education is unnecessary.

Julia Child, a spy? Though hardly a revelation (Child herself wrote about her secret-agent career), it’s one of those pairings that boggle the mind, like the fact that Richard Nixon composed for the piano or that Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller. A gangly six-feet-two-inches tall, the cheerful and utterly sensible television chef hardly seemed a seductive Mata Hari or killer from La Femme Nikita.

In fact, she was neither. She wasn’t really a spy at all, but rather a kind of office manager, albeit an effective one, for the Office of Strategic Services, an intelligence and covert-action agency created during World War II.

Gordon Wood has been writing brilliantly on the American Revolutionary era since at least the 1960s, but many of the essays and lectures collected in this volume date from the 1980s on. In “The American Revolutionary Tradition, or Why America Wants to Spread Democracy Around the World,” Wood explains our irrepressible international ambitions by noting that not only have Americans always considered themselves unique for being a self-created nation endowed with an inordinate amount of moral virtue, but that for much of our history the rest of the world ratified that view with their feet: “The migration to the United States between 1820 and 1920 of over thirty-five million refugees from monarchism gave the Americans’ conception of themselves as a chosen people a less divine and more literal meaning and confirmed for them their preeminence as a revolutionary people.”

Here’s an illustration of what’s wrong with the presenting system. When Ivan Fischer was principal conductor of the NSO, the Budapest Festival Orchestra -- which he founded, and which remains his main orchestra and calling card -- toured the US, but never came to DC. Next year, however, Fischer and the BFO are coming to Washington. One might surmise that the desire of the Kennedy Center and the Washington Performing Arts Society not to present competing events effectively kept Washington audiences from getting to know a significant side of their own conductor until after he was gone.

The summer movie season has arrived, in the form of an in­cred­ibly cut hero from another realm who carries an excessively heavy hammer.

Which is another way of saying that “Thor” opens in theaters today, officially launching 2011’s popcorn-cinema period. But is it worth seeing?

The secret to the region’s most prolific attack may be an inseparable friendship. Last year, toward the beginning of their freshmen year at Stone Bridge, Ashley Herndon and Murielle Tiernan met as prospective high school soccer teammates.

They knew of each other, having faced each other in club soccer games before, but the moment their connection took off. Now the sophomores spend plenty of time off together, catching soccer games or just hanging out. Their tight-knit relationship is reaping dividends for the second-ranked Bulldogs (10-1-1).

Paint Branch has tapped Rochelle Coleman to take over its girls’ basketball program, elevating a former assistant who is also one of the best players to come out of the Burtonsville school.

Coleman, a 2001 Paint Branch graduate, was an All-Met as a senior, when she led the Panthers to a state title. She left school as the Panthers’ career scoring leader before playing collegiately at Syracuse and professionally in the Netherlands. Coleman replaces Dan Feher, who took over for Heather Podosek prior to last season.

Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement Thursday, saying "it's the right time" for him to end a career in which he led his alma mater to the 2002 national championship. (May 5)

Maryland students expressed gratitude on Friday for Gary Williams's career after the men’s basketball coach announced his retirement. (May 6)

A Montgomery County Circuit Court judge Friday ruled in favor of County Executive Isiah Leggett in a sharp dispute over collective bargaining, saying Leggett is not required to back a budget he opposes.

The decision, in a case involving the police union, is a legal victory for Leggett (D), who in recent weeks has been called a law breaker by county labor leaders.

The full financial and political ramifications of the ruling remain unclear.

Trying to take advantage of consumer unease over $4 a gallon gas, Virginia Republicans are pushing to reopen lease sales off the Old Dominion shore to oil companies. But the logic behind the move is as squishy as a tar ball on a polluted beach.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and Rep. Eric Cantor want to reverse the Obama administration’s decision last year to delay lease sales off the Virginia coast until 2017 after a rig leased by BP, the British energy giant, exploded and released about 5 million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico. For three months, oil from the spill gushed into the gulf 5,000 feet down at a rate of 53,000 barrels per day.

The secret to the region’s most prolific attack may be an inseparable friendship. Last year, toward the beginning of their freshmen year at Stone Bridge, Ashley Herndon and Murielle Tiernan met as prospective high school soccer teammates.

They knew of each other, having faced each other in club soccer games before, but the moment their connection took off. Now the sophomores spend plenty of time off together, catching soccer games or just hanging out. Their tight-knit relationship is reaping dividends for the second-ranked Bulldogs (10-1-1).

Paint Branch has tapped Rochelle Coleman to take over its girls’ basketball program, elevating a former assistant who is also one of the best players to come out of the Burtonsville school.

Coleman, a 2001 Paint Branch graduate, was an All-Met as a senior, when she led the Panthers to a state title. She left school as the Panthers’ career scoring leader before playing collegiately at Syracuse and professionally in the Netherlands. Coleman replaces Dan Feher, who took over for Heather Podosek prior to last season.

Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement Thursday, saying "it's the right time" for him to end a career in which he led his alma mater to the 2002 national championship. (May 5)