I know it’s April Fools Day and all, but even Pat Mac wouldn’t deliver so lame a joke as to announce he’s leaving his job with the Browns and going back where he came from, that being the Akron Beacon Journal.

So it must be true.

Despite the ribbing I’ve given him a few times, I always valued McManamon’s Browns coverage with the BJ, and it was interesting last summer when he jumped the journalism ship at Randy Lerner’s behest to supposedly give the juiced-up official site some credibility.

However, it was at turns painful and humorously pathetic to watch him try to straddle two divergent lines of work — the honest reporter and the corporate mouthpiece. Merge those two functions, and you either get a tenacious scribe with plenty of inside dish, or you get a neutered newshound who lacks not only any special access but also the all-important appearance of objectivity. Yep, the two lines are divergent, and ultimately he had to split.

Pat Mac tried to use his humor to paper over a disappointing non-responsiveness to the questions fans posed each week, and I’m sure during this nasty 4-12 season he had some Giles Corey pressures on him. I’ll give him credit for whatever skill it takes to get your bread buttered on both sides and back again. In his departure column, the papering over continues: he implies that it’s not so much a struggle for editorial independence as it is a preference of delivery methods.

Some of us are meant to write for a web site, some of us have newspapers in our blood. …I’m still able to write about the team – just for another forum.

But there are no real mulligans in life. The experience is bound to change him and his readers’ perceptions of him. Maybe his Browns coverage with improve for all he’s seen and for the sources he ought to have cultivated. But the revolving door act makes it a little tougher to accept that his forthcoming reportage is indeed free of whatever biases naturally come from having been inside the organization you’ll once again be covering.

It’s all right, though, I tell myself. It’s just sports, not some grand object lesson on journalistic ethics. Lighten up. Pat’s a mensch, I’m sure, and he deserves to make a living and still sleep well at night. The real battle lines are elsewhere. No one takes Browns coverage seriously anyway. Right?