Great day … I am back in sports journalism.

I have transferred from the news desk at The National, here in Abu Dhabi, to the sports department. And so far it’s been rather like going home again.

Even if “home” now includes quite a lot of cricket and rugby for what is, at heart, a British sports section.

My tasks on Day 1?

To handle copy on what we call here “North American sport.”

Thus, I found and edited a story on Celtics guard Paul Pierce, and how he could win his second NBA championship ring in Los Angeles, near his hometown of Inglewood, at the Lakers’ expense. Basically, a lookahead/look back at Game 5 — which ended at about 8 a.m. today, local time. So, spinning the series ahead to Game 6 is how we handle that. A “PM” approach, for those of you who remember PM newspapers.

My other page was the weekly baseball package, which included a commentary on the decline of offense, a short item on Stephen Strasburg’s big first week in ball and a rail of best/worst players/teams from the previous week.

So, yes, all in my comfort zone. Cricket and rugby … maybe I will get to those later.

We’ve got scads of World Cup copy (and two reporters in South Africa), but everyone in the room is comfortable editing that, even eager to do so, and since it doesn’t fall under my purview …

As is so often the case, the sports people seem to be keen … but also chilled out. More concerned with the joy of putting out a sports section rather than the deadly importance of putting out a news section. Trust me, almost no one in sports journalism believes what they do will change the world … but we may make it easier to bear.

I don’t for a minute regret the eight months I did on the local news copy desk here; the best way to learn about the community you live in is to read its cops-and-robber stories, its court stories, its local ministry stories. I feel as if I have a good sense of how the city/country work, thanks to my time in news.

But now I’m back in the Toy Department, as they allegedly call it at the New York Times … and happy to be here. (Leah has been in sports for two months; but she is on the design side, and I am on the content side … on a full-time staff of about 20.)

We even have the big-screen TV, here in the office … and I’m about to watch the Italy-Paraguay World Cup match. (It’s raining there? What? It should never rain on the World Cup!)

I suddenly am reminded of what went through my mind when I got my first job, in sports, more than 30 years ago:

I get paid for doing this?