A Bay Weekly exclusive   Only 3.6 seconds remained in the last college basketball game of the season, on April 5, when Butler’s Gordon Hayward grabbed a rebound and sped upcourt. The six-foot-eight Hayward, soon to be a wealthy pro, launched a prayer from 50 feet. Its trajectory held rapt the attention of some 49 million people watching on television — not to mention the thousands in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. Would the ball go in to provide a real-life...

  The oil itself may not soil the Bay, but the effects of the massive spill are being felt along its shores by the people who depend on the Gulf fisheries for a living. Jobs are being lost as Virginia and Maryland oyster shucking houses have already begun to see their oyster supply dry up as Gulf fisheries close, one by one. Louisiana supplies Maryland shucking houses with between 60 and 70 percent of their oysters. In turn, those shucking houses provide shells for Maryland’s seed...

Chesapeake Country’s Skyline Drive — with boats, not cars. That’s how Dave Linthicum sees the Patuxent River, which runs by his front door. Ask him why, and off his tongue rolls a list of Patuxent River glories. It’s lovely, for one, he says, with a quiet beauty that creeps up on you like fog. The Patuxent is historic. Humans have lived on its shores for 10,000 years, leaving their relics and place markers. Native Americans wrote their chapters of history on the land,...

  Bernie Fowler’s Sneaker Index did not soar this year. He saw 341x2 inches of leg, for a water clarity index equal to that of 2004, but far below the goal of 57 inches last seen in 1960. The former state senator and Patuxent River champion needed many to the ninth power to describe the years it will take before the river is as clear, hence unpolluted, as in his youth.  “Bernie Fowler is never going to live long enough to see the river cleaned up,” he said, comparing...