Roid Warriors.(The Talk of the Town)(Teri Thompson )

For Alex Rodriguez, we now know, the early years of this decade, when he was pumping himself full of Primobolan, seemed like a "different culture," a mini sixties revival without much oversight. "It was such a loosey-goosey era," he said in his televised confession, lips quivering. Hard as it may be to believe, he wasn't entirely full of it. "Even in our own newspaper, back then, I got a lot of 'Not another steroid story' looks from people," Teri Thompson, an editor at the News, said the other day, during a brief lull between the latest A-Rod follow-up and the start of Barry Bonds's perjury trial. "Everyone has kind of come around to the fact that this is a huge story of our time. But it was a lonely beat out there for a couple of years, anyway."

Thompson, who grew up in Arkansas in the sixties, and took a mid-career sabbatical to earn a law degree, is the media's premier steroids watchdog, having presided over the News' sports investigative unit, or I-Team, since 2000. She now has three reporters at her disposal, and deploys them widely in pursuit of all things drug-related. (Their stories are typically accompanied by a syringe graphic.) At a time when investigative journalism is coming under assault, the I-Team makes an unlikely inspiration for would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins.

"This is Jose's original manuscript, before the lawyers got hold of it," Thompson said, referring to Jose Canseco's best-selling "Juiced," which is often credited with exposing the so-called "steroid era." In the version on Thompson's desk, its title was "The Chemist." On a nearby bookshelf, she had a "Mustache of Justice" coffee mug, featuring a likeness of Representative Henry Waxman, who questioned Canseco at congressional steroid hearings in 2005.

Nathaniel Vinton, the newest member of the I-Team, took a seat next to Thompson and recalled his initiation into the beat, a year ago. "I flew straight to the first hearing on Capitol Hill," he said. "And then went straight from there to seedy Pasadena, Texas, for, like, a month."

"Nate almost got us killed there," Thompson said. "We were in this rental car with a G.P.S., and we were trying to figure out where Andy Pettitte's father lived. So we were in this cul-de-sac kind of place where these big houses are all stuck together, and Nate pulls over. I'm like, 'Look, people have seen us driving around this block forty times. I'm from the South. They'll come out with a gun any second.' All of a sudden, these three guys from three separate houses come out toward our car, and I'm like, 'Go, go, go!' "