I guess I passed my initiation.

Last night at 5 minutes to airtime, executive producer Matt Liddy came to me and said, “We lost the signal to the fair. You may be doing sports.” We don’t do our entire newscast live from the State Fair at 10 p.m., we do have one anchor, weather and sports out there.

Technical gremlins messed with the audio, so we had a nice HD picture from the fair, but no audio. That’s a problem.

My good question (on the Lynx) aired, and then I left the anchor desk to go chat with producer Gregg Litman, who was doing sports last night.

In the meantime, we tried to get Chris Shaffer on the phone, but the signal kept dropping out. So we took a break, tried again, and failed again. I tweeted it out, and people thought I was kidding that I was going to do sports.

Nope.

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Then we took another break, and rather than trying a third time get Shaffer on the phone, Amelia and I took over.

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Believe me, it’s good we have Mark Rosen and Chris Shaffer on a nightly basis, but that was pretty fun getting through it with Amelia.

Oh, about my initiation. This weekend I’m taking on a new challenge at WCCO — I’ll be anchoring Sunday night at 5:30 p.m. and 10 pm with my good friend Liz Collin. On big news nights or during special events, I’ll be doing Saturday as well (I’ll be on this Saturday live at the fair, and then at the station at 10).

I’ll still be doing Good Question, Monday through Thursday nights at 10.

I couldn’t be more excited to be sitting next to Liz on Sunday nights, and I think we make an incredible team. Liz grew up in Worthington and in her time here, she’s been involved in covering almost every big story that’s happened: from tornados, to flooding, to the RNC Convention. She’s also our top investigative reporter, as you saw in this week’s I-TEAM story on St. Paul’s Union Station condo debacle.

I’ve been here since 2003, my wife is a Wayzata High School graduate, our two kids were born here. For 3 1/2 years I’ve been answering Good Questions, trying to help make sense of a fascinating time in our history. Before that, I was the one covering every big story. The night the 35W bridge collapsed, I was one of the first reporters on the air.

Along with meteorologist Lauren Casey and sports legend Mark Rosen, you’re not going to find a stronger line-up on Sunday nights. So I hope you’ll start tuning in (or keep tuning in) starting this weekend!

Hopefully, I won’t have to do the weather anymore.