Noted Briefly From the Skins Locker Room

* For the first 10 minutes of the open locker room session, there were 42 media members and assorted hangers-on, and zero professional football players. I took advantage of the downtime to peer around the locker room, at, for example, the notes on dealing with cross-country flights and dehydration.

* Oh, and to peer at the fruit. Remember the pineapple? An homage to Chris Cooley's Pro Bowl honor, delivered at 4 a.m. the morning after the Vikings win by some plucky young lads from Alexandria, handed off to a security guard and then deposited on Chris Cooley's stool? Well, today the pineapple--or at least a pineapple--was in Clinton Portis's locker.

"What is that doing there?" Portis asked. There was no answer forthcoming. I asked Cooley whether the pineapple had switched lockers.

"I have no idea," he said.

A mystery. And hark! A mango, inside safety Omar Stoutmire's locker! Was this also a gift from fans, fans who perhaps wished for Stoutmire to make a postseason trip to India?

"I'm waiting for it to get soft so I can cut it open," Stoutmire told me. "That's a good piece of fruit."

* Mike Sellers to Kevin Sampson: "Hey did you have a nice nap? I was gonna mess with you so bad. You were out like a baby."

I asked Sampson about this. He admitted to copping a nap between meetings. Then he left the locker room and came back five minutes later.

"I just took another nap," he told me.

* Todd Yoder's mustache--which Rock Cartwright was calling a porn stache and which Sellers called the Dirk Diggler--is gone. I nearly wept in distress. Yoder insisted he's flashing back to playoffs with Tampa Bay, where he started clean-shaven and showcased a full-on beard by the Super Bowl win.

"I told you, I know the plan," Yoder told me, explaining he was growing a real playoff beard. "If we make it all the way back to the Super Bowl I'll rock the mustache, just so in the pictures it'll be sweet."

Rock, though, still has the mohawk. It was featured on the front of ESPN.com (headline: "D.C. United") and on the front of SI.com (headline: "Next Stop: Playoffs"). Rock had large printouts of the latter in his locker.

"Did you see that?" Rock said to Marcus Mason.

"That's wack," Mason said to Rock. "You need to cut your hair."

* Marcus Mason (5-foot-9 and 218 pounds) was trying on the winter coat of Stephon Heyer (6-6, 325). That's a difference of 0 foot 9 inches and 107 pounds. He looked for all the world like Kenny from South Park.

"He has a tendency to try to put my stuff on," Heyer said. "He wants to be like me so bad. I don't know why. Why?" he asked Mason. No response. I asked Mason about the size difference.

"My heart's bigger than his," Mason said. "That's about it, really."