Some 40 years after the fact, I can still remember the substance of the note, if not the exact wording. It was written out on paper – no email or online reader comments then – and came from Ron Lauretti, whose son Scott was a Carlisle High School football player. There was something in there about my “stupid reporting,” and the thing is, Ron wasn’t wrong.

I was.

In a previous game story for the Carlisle Evening Sentinel – the first place I worked out of college – I had shouted out the members of Carlisle’s starting offensive line, and somehow neglected Scott. Ron informed me in no uncertain terms that his son had been a season-long starter.

And, well, ya know, oops.

Indications are that Scott overcame that long-ago slight. He went on to Lehigh University, then Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious business school, and now runs his own company in Savannah, Ga. But that’s not the point. The point is that journalism mistakes suck. They gnaw at you, stick with you, haunt you.

Jeff Pearlman, a former Sports Illustrated writer and the author of 10 books (not to mention a two-time guest on “After the Buzzer,” the podcast I co-host with LNP columnist Mike Gross), recently wrote about mistakes on his substack. He noted that because these errors occur in “a painfully public space,” they are “terrifying,” “heartbreaking” and “humiliating.” He also quoted Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who said errors “stick in your mind forever.”

Pearlman, whose books include biographies of Bo Jackson, Brett Favre and Roger Clemens, cited a particularly memorable flub from early in his career, when he was with the Nashville Tennessean. Assigned to shadow a rock band on the rise called Dreaming in English, he put together a piece of which he was particularly proud, only to discover that he had gotten one of the band members’ last names wrong.

That, I can assure you, is a gut punch. The goal of virtually everyone I have known in the profession is to get it right and say it right – nail down the facts and then present them in a manner that is hopefully interesting or amusing or thought-provoking. And when you fail to accomplish that mission (the first part in particular), it can literally be painful.

That is not an exaggeration. Mistakes evoke a certain sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, a feeling that you might be better off working the drive-thru at Mickey D’s. There is an understanding that while you are not trying to cure cancer, you are presenting your work – with your name on it! – to a bunch of strangers. And it’s pretty damn embarrassing when it doesn’t come out right.

The good part is, the profession can be somewhat like baseball: If you go down swinging, you have to get right back in there the next day, and take your whacks all over again. It’s the best remedy, but it doesn’t mean those mistakes aren’t always lurking somewhere in the back of your mind, and that they won’t bubble to the surface when you least expect it.

To this day I think about the time I wrote Andre Iguodala, then with the Sixers, is not from Springfield, Ill., but Chicago. That was in 2011, and a reporter from a Springfield newspaper was only too happy to remind me of my error. To this day I think about the time I wrote about a Lafayette University basketball player named Andrew Brown being a senior when in fact he was a junior. That was in 2008. To this day I think about repeatedly misspelling the last name of Lampeter-Strasburg baseball player Eric Lukacs. That was in 1994. (And seeing as Lukacs is now a Lancaster police officer, I’m glad he didn’t hold a grudge.)

I also remember writing that Elizabethtown High School baseball players Greg and Mark Garber were brothers, when in fact they were cousins. That was in 1993. And I remember springing out of bed in the wee hours one morning, pulling on some clothes and driving to the nearest Turkey Hill to see if I got the details of a trade involving the Sixers’ Clemon Johnson correct. Alas, I did not. That was in 1986.

Certainly you’d like to think you learn from your mistakes. And certainly there have been some amusing side trips during this eternal (and often elusive) search for full and complete accuracy. One year, for example, I was covering the Eagles in training camp, when they were still holding such sessions at Lehigh University. Someone told me Brian Dawkins was looking for me.

That didn’t sound good, seeing as I had written about the Birds’ star safety that day. But as it turned out he wanted to set the record straight about the topic of that piece – facing retired Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, who was about to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“I think I misquoted myself,” Dawkins told me, adding that he came to realize that he hadn’t gone against Marino after all, because of an injury one of them suffered.

So that was a relief. But too often in journalism you’re left with that other feeling. Too often you are left feeling stupid, as Ron Lauretti might have put it, back in the day. You’d like to think, deep down, that that’s a good thing in some perverse way, that it simply means you care. Doesn’t make it any easier when mistakes come to light, though. Then you just have to dust yourself off and get back in there the next day. And the one after that, and the one after that. Indeed, it’s all you can do.