Urgency

To treat every at-bat, every pitch and every play as if his team's postseason future depended on it, Phillies manager Larry Bowa reiterated that players need experience. Until then, they just don't know. Bowa talked more about the sense of urgency he said some of his players have lacked as the Phillies clung to a half-game lead over Florida in the National League wild-card race before last night's game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. "It takes time," Bowa said.

CINCINNATI - The Bengals know they flubbed a chance to put themselves in better shape for a playoff berth, and now there is a greater urgency to beat the Eagles on Thursday at the Linc. Penalties. Dropped passes. A game-turning interception. A defensive letdown at the end. They reviewed all of those on Monday as they did a fast-forward to their next game. A 20-19 loss to Dallas Cowboys on Sunday left the Bengals tied with Pittsburgh at 7-6 for the second AFC wild card. The Steelers and the AFC North-leading Ravens (9-4)

The 5 a.m. wakeup call that began their trip home from Akron, Ohio, on Thursday wasn't so tough for Phil Martelli and the St. Joseph's Hawks to bear. That's because there was a sense of progress in their 65-62 victory over the Zips Wednesday night. The Hawks rectified some of the shortcomings that irritated Martelli in the season-opening loss to East Carolina on Nov. 25. "We definitely played better team defense, and we responded better to game situations down the stretch," said Martelli, whose 1-1 Hawks face a difficult task today at the Fieldhouse against tall, experienced Old Dominion.

Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is still no one coordinating government efforts to thwart a new assault, the cochairmen of the 9/11 commission told Congress yesterday. "I don't find anyone is in charge," former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton said. In their testimony, Hamilton and former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean outlined a government bureaucracy that missed clues to the attacks because it did not share information or take responsibility for stopping terrorists. Many of those problems still exist, Hamilton said.

The stress of the 76ers' late-season swoon seems to be getting to them. Players and coaches hunkered down yesterday behind closed doors at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine to talk among themselves for almost two hours before players fled without anyone talking to the media. That left coach Maurice Cheeks to face the inquisitors and to interpret Chris Webber's comments Wednesday night after the Sixers suffered their 10th loss in their last 12 games, a 101-91 defeat at the hands of the Detroit Pistons.

If the Flyers have any chance of beating the Los Angeles Kings at the Forum tonight, of salvaging this deteriorating season and improving the job security of coach Bill Dineen, they must do at least one thing - regain their work ethic. The last-place Flyers have not only lost eight of their last 10 games, they have done so with little emotion or verve. Some people inside the organization have even called these last 10 games "an embarrassment. " And it's not coincidental that a similar western road trip at this time last season - when the Flyers went 0-3-1 - marked the beginning of the end of the team's playoffs hopes.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said: "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children with the fierce urgency of now. " Decades later, there is still an "urgency of now" in fulfilling the ideals of equality and justice that originally were framed in Philadelphia.

It's time to wake up and look around. There's a wild card to be won. That was Larry Bowa's take after the Phillies' 5-2 loss yesterday to Milwaukee at Miller Park. The victory allowed the Brewers, a team that had the third-worst record in baseball, to sweep a team that had a half-game lead over the Florida Marlins in the National League wild-card race. "When you're in this position, it's no mercy," Bowa said. "You kill people. You kick them. When they try to get up you kick them again.

As a basketball player for Roxborough High in the mid-1990s, Stephen Brandt was a guy with "a high motor" - a tall, skinny guard who gave everything every minute he was on the floor, who liked to get things done on the court. As the current principal of Roxborough, he's not much different, though his actions are more likely to lead to a more orderly, high-achieving school than an athletic victory. Brandt is one of seven school leaders being honored Tuesday as some of the Philadelphia School District's best.

WITH THE PASSING of the trade deadline, we come now to the next annual baseball ritual for any underperforming team: the parsing of statements. (To be followed by the promise of better times ahead and the mailing of season-ticket brochures. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.) For several years, the Phillies had been a whatever-it-takes organization. They started with a homegrown base of players and added free agents liberally. They spent money in ways that no Phillies team ever had. But then came the most recent offseason, where they settled more and gambled more than ever during this run. They had a bad offensive team in 2011 and did nothing appreciable to fix it. They gambled on a super-optimistic timetable for Ryan Howard's return from an Achilles' injury.

YOU HAVE TO wonder about the lack of urgency new Sixers president and general manager Sam Hinkie has shown in searching for a head coach to replace Doug Collins. Collins resigned on April 18, opening the door for Hinkie to be hired from the Houston Rockets on May 11. Since then, there has been a lot of talk about how Hinkie might go about putting together a new roster for a team coming off a disappointing 34-48 season, but barely a whisper about who will direct the team once it gets on the court.

Camden Bishop Dennis Sullivan delivered an impassioned homily Friday evening at a Vineland church, telling a crowd of more than 1,500 that the Catholic Church was pushing for immigration reform in Congress with "a moral urgency we have not had in the last decade. " The sermon, at Divine Mercy Parish, came as Congress appears to be on the cusp of changes that have eluded lawmakers in recent years. Given the new opportunity, Sullivan urged parishioners to contact their members of Congress and ask them to move legislation forward.

UNIONDALE, N.Y. - The chanting started with 1 minute, 18 seconds remaining. It was directed at the New York Islanders, but the words would unintentionally mock the Flyers. We want playoffs . . . We want playoffs . . . On a desperate night, the Flyers did not look desperate. Playing against a fast team, a team on the rise, a team holding one of the playoff spots that they want for themselves, the Flyers just weren't good enough. Hanging onto a 1-1 tie in the second period, they made the mistake that so often ends up in their net. Playing from behind in the third period, they were simply unable to sustain anything in the offensive end. And if the 4-1 final score overstated what happened on Tuesday night at Nassau Coliseum, it pretty accurately reflected the postgame mood.

As a basketball player for Roxborough High in the mid-1990s, Stephen Brandt was a guy with "a high motor" - a tall, skinny guard who gave everything every minute he was on the floor, who liked to get things done on the court. As the current principal of Roxborough, he's not much different, though his actions are more likely to lead to a more orderly, high-achieving school than an athletic victory. Brandt is one of seven school leaders being honored Tuesday as some of the Philadelphia School District's best.

BOSTON - The Flyers are in crisis mode. They have lost three straight, haven't scored in the five periods since taking an early 4-1 lead before collapsing against Pittsburgh on Thursday, and are in danger of missing the playoffs for just the second time in the last 18 seasons. After a listless 3-0 loss to the Boston Bruins on Saturday, coach Peter Laviolette, whose job isn't as safe as it looked a month ago, held a closed-door meeting with his players that lasted 20 minutes. Twenty minutes to coax the Flyers into playing 60 minutes each game.

HARTFORD, Conn. - The family of two young boys killed in an apparent-murder suicide - and state police - said Thursday that they want to know why the boys' grandmother, with a history of mental-health problems, had access to the revolver used in the shootings. The shooting has added urgency to a legislative review of access to guns that is already under way in Connecticut, where a troubled 20-year-old gunned down 26 people at a Newtown school on Dec. 14. The boys' grandmother, Debra Denison, 47, was supposed to take them to a birthday party Tuesday but instead drove to a nearby lake, where she and the children were found shot to death.

WASHINGTON - Ten days before a new deadline for broad, automatic government spending cuts, the sense of urgency that surrounded other recent fiscal crises is absent. Government agencies are preparing to absorb an $85 billion hit to their budgets, and politicians, at least for now, seem willing to accept the consequences. President Obama, back from a golfing weekend, warned Tuesday that "people will lose their jobs" if Congress doesn't act. But lawmakers weren't in session to hear his appeal, and they aren't coming back to work until next week.

WASHINGTON - One day after President Obama presented his far-reaching proposal for gun-policy reform at an emotional White House news conference, Vice President Biden renewed the administration's call for action, telling a summit of the nation's mayors that the issue is "more urgent and immediate" than any other facing the country. Speaking Thursday at the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Biden devoted the entirety of his remarks to delivering a point-by-point defense of the White House gun agenda that he helped to spearhead, using stark, often personal language.