Food fight!!

It's Gilman vs. Gonzaga, Princeton vs. Catholic, Tigers vs. Cardinals, Kendel vs. Katie.

It's Slots vs. Believe.

A guy from Arbutus, "Gateway to Halethorpe," takes on a guy from Rockville, "Queen City of the I-270 Corridor."

I'm getting this image of Martin and Bobby in a great fight, with Nancy Grasmick as round-card girl. And in Bobby's corner is that great old cut man, William Donald Schaefer. And Martin has his father-in-law, Joe Curran, fanning him with a towel.

Pardon my reveries.

I'm a fan of fights.

I like backyard wrestling.

I'm a connoisseur of transparent egotism. I have a masochistic fascination with the decline of idealism, too.

Strikes me that the Baltimore schools crisis has become just what I could have predicted it would become two weeks ago, except that predicting it would have been too predictable.

We have just witnessed the first smoky skirmish between the young ambitious Democratic mayor of Baltimore and the young ambitious first-Republican-governor-of-Maryland-since-Agnew.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., playing Big Man and pretty much adopting 92,000 Baltimore children as his own, offered the city a $42 million bailout of the city schools. It was a loan.

Ehrlich wanted control of the schools, which might have been fine, except for the part about maybe tearing up a union contract with the city teachers to force extravagant cuts in the system's operating budget. He lost me there.

Too bad.

The state's advance of $42 million would have helped the school system preserve the gains it has made, in terms of student achievement, in recent years. More, Ehrlich's support would have constituted Big Think: a genuine embrace of the kind of regionalism that has been sorely lacking in political leadership here. It would have been Ehrlich's way of telling his suburban and rural constituencies that a stable and improved Baltimore public school system eventually will lift the quality of life in the entire state.

Ehrlich looked like he was on his way there.

But demanding accountability is one thing, breaking a deal with teachers, engaged in the great challenge of getting Baltimore's kids up to speed with their better-off suburban peers, quite another.

The teachers didn't create this mess. The teachers helped make the improvements that justify further investment in the schools. Picking a fight with them risked doing permanent damage to the system - at the least, making it hard to hire good teachers; at the worst, a strike.