We’ve been so used to celebrating great things happening to Jay Mariotti, that this news is a real kick to the groin.

First, we had this glorious day last August when Jay threw a hissy fit after the Olympics and quit his job at the Sun Times.  He said it was because newspapers were dying (as if that was news) and the Sun Times had no plan to make their Web site competitive.  He was right, and we were just happy for him to leave, taking his mock indignity and screeching out of town.

We had to deal with rumors that he might end up at the Tribune.  He and Sam Zell are kindred spirits, you know self-promoting jackasses completely and blissfully ignorant to the rest of the world.  But the Tribune couldn’t find a way around Jay’s non-compete clause in his Sun Times contract.

Then, in January, Jay went to AOL Fanhouse, where he’s been easily ignored all this time.

Life has gone on without him, and we’ve all been the better for it.

But all this time, one line in that e-mail he sent to the Chicago Reader has haunted us all.

Yes, I had a non-compete clause in the Sun-Times deal that prohibits me from writing for the Tribune for a year.

That year is almost up.  I think we all thought that when he signed on at Fanhouse that he’d be there a while.  But a while is about to end.  Jay’s gearing up for a return to the one place he’s most unwanted.  Chicago sports.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.  The Tribune got Mike Downey to take a buyout and they got him off the books.  As easy as it would be to replace him (a brick, a string and a typewriter would have done the trick, given how terrible Downey was in his return to Chicago), the Tribune hasn’t done it.

You can say they’re in financial trouble, they can’t bring in another columnist.  But that’s not how business works.  They could have “promoted” somebody they’re already paying, like David Huh or Teddy Greenstein and paid them the same they already are.  But they didn’t.  They don’t need another columnist, because they’ve got one on the way.

What do you think the impetus behind ChicagoNow.com is?  After shitcanning chicagosports.com, they needed a “reimagined” online presence for Jay to come write for.  You think the summer launch of that site and the fact that at the end of the summer Jay becomes available to sign a deal with the Tribune Company is a coincidence?

Later this summer, Mariotti will sign on to write a column for the Tribune Sports section and a blog on ChicagoNow.com, and more.  Oh, so much more.  Please kill me now.

The real question is why the hell does the Tribune Company want him?  I missed the part where Sun Times readers were so upset that he left.  I’m sure they lost subscribers, but that’s only because every newspaper is losing subscribers, but I’d be shocked if more than a handful of people stopped buying the Sun-Times because Mariotti wasn’t in it anymore.

In that e-mail to the Chicago Reader, Jay says some prescient things about a possible move to the Tribune.  You know, prescient, for a completely wrong dumbass.

Maybe someday, the Tribune thing will happen, but if it causes mass resignations on the staff, gee, I don’t want to disrupt home lives or anything. All I know is, these aren’t the Tribsters I lampooned for years. This is the multimedia group that will survive in Chicago and thrive in the future. They have a plan.

They have a plan alright, and it’s at least 11 chapters long.

When Zell and Mariotti talked last fall, writing was just one part of the deal they were cooking up.  There was the potential for Jay to do TV and radio, too.

Last week, WGN canned a couple of old battle axes in Kathy and Judy, who for almost 20 years had one of the most successful (and profitable) shows in town.  The Tribune Company didn’t really say why they took the harpies off the air, but analysts wondered if the new Portable People Meter way of measuring radio ratings had something to do with it.  The idea is that the prehistoric Arbitron method of measuring who was listening to what (by filling out a “diary” of your listening habits) skewed towards older listeners.

For years, GMs at The Score and WMVP have stared in disbelief at the ratings that WGN’s SportsCentral evening show got.  They could not believe that those ratings could actually be accurate.  Their oft stated theories always blamed the archaic Arbitron system, and felt that the fogey-targeted programming during the day on WGN carried over to SportsCentral.  We always laughed at them, because SportsCentral did well among younger men.  But now with the PPMs measuring the ratings, we’ll see who was right.

If, as expected, SportsCentral takes it in the shorts in the next ratings book, who’s to say that it doesn’t become SportsCentral with Kap and Mariotti?  Or maybe just SportsCentral with Mariotti.

I will give Mariotti credit for one thing.  His WMVP radio show in 2004 was surprisingly not terrible.  He wasn’t screaming and yelling like he is on that terrible ESPN TV show.  He was still a prick, but not nearly as insufferable as you’d have expected.  He claims he was ousted from that show because WMVP was worried that with him still in their employ they had no chance of keeping the Sox and Bulls rights they currently had.  He loves to blame things on Jerry Reinsdorf.  If only Jerry could find a way to keep this from happening.

So it won’t be long before Jay makes a triumphant return to the Chicago sports scene, and if you think we had it bad before, you have no idea how bad it will be this time.  He’ll have his newspaper column, he’ll be blogging away, we’ll have to see him sitting smugly on the Chicago Tribune Live set on Comcast and he’s going to end up on WGN Radio in some capacity.  Who knows, maybe Kap will keep his job and Mariotti can handle the 9-12 slot talking with his “girlfriends?”  If this happens, all we can do is continue to pray for a meteor to hit the Tribune Tower.

But then again, since Jay never leaves his house, it would just be him and the (other) cockroaches that survive.