A year ago this month seven of us sat around a table and raised our glasses. We were a formidable lot — two sports columnists, a sports editor, a sports writer, a preeminent baseball reporter, a former sports executive, a legendary sports journalist who now advises teams — and we had plenty to toast.

We toasted fond memories of remarkable games we had covered, athletes we admired, the Olympics where we met, that World Series we’d never forget. And, above all, we toasted the survivors. We toasted our kick-ass selves.

There’s a famous line every female inevitably learns when she enters the world of sports: Check your dignity at the door. From a young age girls are told to not make trouble, and if those girls yearn for a career in sports they might as well write that adage on the back of their hand. Forget your dignity, keep your head down and you’ll get along fine. If you’re extremely lucky you might even go an entire season without an incident that demeans or belittles you, makes you feel as if you barely exist.

At our clever Algonquin Round Table of sports we toasted the intrepid young women who were following in our Converse and stilettos, and we gave thanks that they would have it a bit easier. But we also knew. Those of us who have toiled within the sports bubble and loved many moments of it sensed a reckoning was overdue.

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It used to be just a whisper of harassment here, a rumor of bad behavior over there, hardly surprising considering the sports world is heavily male dominated and the power structure severely skewed. But rarely were perpetrators made public; rarely did the women who were mistreated give voice to these violations.

Thanks to the whistleblowers in Hollywood, the #MeToo awakening is universal. It’s spreading throughout the arts industry, the restaurant culture, the halls of government, the newsrooms that shape how America is informed. It’s cultural and societal and it’s coming for sports, hard and fast, where the machismo is thick and so few women are in position to bring about real change.

Don’t be a troublemaker. Check your dignity at the door.

A lifetime ago, I had one very public, very ugly situation that has been chronicled ad nauseam. Many people were hurt, jobs were lost, dignity destroyed. I ended up in exile for six years, working and living in Australia. For decades, I’ve eschewed speaking or writing about it, partly because the players involved don’t deserve to be forever vilified for one awful day.

The actual hurtful acts from that day don’t haunt me, though the vile reverberations from the periphery linger. There were the private investigators, the victim shaming — she’s a slut, she’s a whore, she’s a prude, she shouldn’t have been there, she should’ve spoken up earlier — and, most awful, the fans who retaliated with actual violence. Forgiveness saved me, along with being blessedly surrounded by supportive bosses and colleagues, from Boston to Sydney, from the Bay Area to New York and many points in between.

The calls used to come several times a year but now they’re nearly weekly, young female sports journalists seeking advice on how to deal with a volatile situation. One woman a few months ago was physically assaulted while covering a professional team but feared being taken off the beat if she reported it. (Her employer eventually was looped in; it’s being handled internally.)

Another fears losing her job if she reports the obscene comments her editor makes in her direction on most nights after deadline. She worries the blame will be shifted and she’ll be labeled “difficult” or “a bitch.” Still, another wonders if she’ll be blacklisted from covering the NFL if she dares to complain about the star football player who is all but stalking her.

A few Sundays ago, I looked around the Oakland Coliseum press box and could still count the female journalists there for the New York Giants-Raiders game on one hand. It made me wonder how many generations of smart women we’ve lost because they realized their dream wasn’t worth checking their dignity.

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Amelia Rayno adores her current job. She’s a features reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, writing about food trends and restaurant openings and cool travel destinations. It was her decision to move off the beat covering University of Minnesota basketball for the paper, nearly a year after she wrote a column detailing how Gophers athletic director Norwood Teague sexually harassed her for many months and then iced her out when she wouldn’t give in to his demands.

Rayno was extremely reluctant to make public Teague’s abhorrent behavior toward her, only doing so after revelations of his harassment of two university employees brought about Teague’s resignation in August 2015. Years later, she still rarely speaks publicly about Teague’s harassment or the vicious fallout, but as many of us are learning, our voices don’t matter much if we’re only screaming on the inside.

“I’ve heard so many men in these last few months saying they don’t understand why (the #MeToo revelations) are just coming out now,” Rayno told me, her voice cracking slightly. “Well, I think they’d understand why women stay quiet if they knew people would make you feel like it’s your fault, if they questioned why you were there (in a locker room, where teams and leagues designate interviews take place), or say, ‘Are you sure you weren’t flirting?’ or ask what you were wearing.

“They say, ‘Well, you’re in a man’s job, you’re tough, you should be able to put up with this.’”

After Teague’s deviance was revealed, the backlash against Rayno was predictably disgraceful. Gophers fans went through her old social media accounts; she was labeled “a whore” because she dared wear a bikini while atop a paddleboard. Her own colleagues wondered why she didn’t just brush off Teague’s predatory behavior, as if an athletic director cornering a reporter in the back of a cab and trying to grope her was perfectly normal.

“With powerful men doing horrible things, there’s a pattern and the pattern fit him,” she said. “He was charming. He was enticing because he’d tell you all kinds of stuff on background and speak honestly, bluntly. I was shocked he’d be so brazen and so inappropriate with a reporter, but of course he was getting away with it (with other women). When their stories came out it sickened me that this was a pattern with him, that he could dismiss their allegations as oops, a bad night, that he accidentally had too much alcohol.

“I didn’t want him to go to the next place and be able to pass it off.”

After we hung up, she sent this text, and my heart broke just a little: “As I mentioned, after I wrote my piece, I was dogged for months, whether it was emails, tweets or casual ‘jokes’ about the subject from people in my office. I think everyone thought it was ‘over,’ even when I told a couple editors I was really struggling in the aftermath. But it definitely wasn’t over for me. So that’s one thing I’ve been thinking about as all these stories come out. What these women went through then, yes, but also what they’re going through now. Speaking up unleashes another avalanche of reactions and emotions and forces women to relive those events and the feelings they elicited over and over. That’s why after I wrote my piece I didn’t speak publicly about it again until just very recently. It was just all so much.”

Teague, somewhat surprisingly, hasn’t yet resurfaced with an executive gig at a small college. The formidable boys’ club in sports didn’t provide him with a parachute to land elsewhere, which is what happened with Yanni Hufnagel.

In 2016, Hufnagel admitted to investigators at UC-Berkeley that when he was an assistant on the men’s basketball team he tried to lure a female reporter to his apartment for sex following a game she covered. In a subsequent text message to her, he joked about her coming over to have a three-way with him and his friend. After rebuffing Hufnagel’s advances, the reporter alerted the university to his behavior. She also accused the coach of withholding information she needed in order to cover the team; she claimed he also intentionally fed her bad scoops, and eventually she lost her job.

Cal released Hufnagel from his job but a short time later the University of Nevada hired him, though he and the Wolf Pack parted ways after the 2017 NCAA tournament.

The female reporter, who was never publicly identified, was 24 when her world came crashing down. I tried for days without luck to reach her, to ask her if blowing the whistle was worth it.

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Tick tock. The news breaks like ferocious waves against rocks, the stories detailing alleged harassment and predatory behavior throughout the world of sports, each more shocking than the one before it.

Last Sunday, just as a compelling slate of NFL games were about to begin, Sports Illustrated reported that at least four former Carolina Panthers employees received “‘significant’ monetary settlements due to inappropriate conduct and comments by team owner Jerry Richardson.

Beyond using sexually suggestive language toward female staff members and directing a racial slur at an African-American Panthers scout, SI described lewd, perverse behavior by Richardson, now 81. He reportedly decreed “Jeans Day” at the club’s offices so he could have a reason to “ask women to turn around so he could admire their backsides,” according to SI.

Confidential settlements were reached, payments made to the complainants, non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses signed “to shield the owner and the organization from further liability and damaging publicity.” One of the women who agreed to these conditions dreads her name becoming public, convinced she’ll be blackballed and never work in sports again, according to an associate of hers.

“In these parts, if you work for an NFL team it’s one of the most coveted jobs you can get,” the woman’s associate told me. “You have to understand, Mr. Richardson is more powerful than some politicians here. He’s in charge of the hiring, the firing, who gets promoted. His behavior in the workplace was abominable but if you even nicely told him to knock it off, you knew your job was at risk. And who wants to lose a job, especially a great job, in this economy?”

Tick. The NFL Network, the league’s TV arm, announced earlier this month it had suspended commentators Marshall Faulk, Ike Taylor, and Heath Evans following a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Jami Cantor, a former wardrobe stylist. Cantor also alleged harassment by Eric Weinberger, then the network’s executive producer and a powerful figure in sports media, and Warren Sapp, the Hall of Fame defensive lineman who was fired by the NFL Network in 2015 following an arrest for soliciting a prostitute.

The details in Cantor’s suit are lurid and specific. Unsolicited texts of body parts. Videos of masturbation. Complaints to supervisors that were laughed off or minimized. Former NFL Network commentators Donovan McNabb and Eric Davis were also named in the suit. Both have been suspended by ESPN, where they host radio shows.

Tock. Last week, a Boston Globe investigative report depicted ESPN as a hostile work environment for women to the point where some female sports journalists felt the need to hide pregnancies or take shorter maternity leave as a way to protect their coveted positions. One anchor, Sara Walsh, felt such pressure to prove she was committed to her job that worked her shift while suffering a miscarriage.

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Lisa Guerrero working a Monday night NFL game in 2003. (Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)

Some years ago Lisa Guerrero began pitching a book about her travails in the world of sports, titled “Between a Jock and a Hard Place.” People who read the outline told her the true stories she wanted to tell sounded far too fictional to be taken seriously.

“They couldn’t process that an industry could be filled with so many bad guys and moments like the ones I described,” Guerrero said.

One of her anecdotes is still so achingly raw, even though it happened in 2003, when she was the only female on Fox’s “The Best Damn Sports Show Period.” Fending off misogynist comments with a grin seemed to be a daily job requirement — I remember marveling at her grace — but then came, as she calls it, “the straw that nearly broke me.”

It was at a roast thrown by the network for John Kruk, the former major leaguer turned analyst. “In front of a live audience, with all the cast from the show on the dais, little did I know I was the one who was going to be roasted most viciously,” Guerrero said.

The pain in her voice was palpable as she recounted sitting there in shame, lights all aglow, the audience cackling as her colleagues hammered out gross insults and slanderous lies.

Now we know why you got the Barry Bonds interview, you slept with him.

Kobe talked to you because of your big boobs.

“It went on and on, my own network treating me like a sexual object. They had to change the camera angle at the break because I was in tears,” Guerrero said. “I demanded to be cut out of the special. How dare they? They planned it to make me look like a fool.”

She was the one who’d jump on a 6 a.m. cross-country flight to interview the big gets back then, the Randy Johnsons and Mia Hamms. She silently put up with executives telling her to wear short skirts, and putting her on the side of the set so viewers could see her legs. She’d come prepared to debate the latest quarterback controversy or coaching change and be told by her bosses she needed to “smile more and argue less.” Check your dignity.

Guerrero also has harrowing tales from her year as the sideline reporter for Monday Night Football, abusive behavior no woman should have to endure. In 1996, while working as an actress, she kept her cool during a private audition at the home of Steven Seagal while he wore only a silk robe. One thread links both careers: Women who complained were women who didn’t belong in either business.

“I’ve always been a pretty tough cookie. For 10 years I was often the only woman in the locker room or one of a handful of women,” she said. “But I was so thrown and shaken from that John Kruk roast, it nearly broke me. After Monday Night Football I went into a hole for a year. It completely flipped the script for me in how I felt about myself and my value as a reporter. Then when I tried to tell my story for years, nobody could believe it.”

And now? Now she has “the best job in the world” working as an investigative correspondent for Inside Edition. Some assignments are light and fun; others change the way we consume goods. Guerrero literally catches bad guys doing bad things.

“There’s one saving grace in all of this,” Guerrero said. “We’re finally talking about it. That’s the only way to bring about change.”

One of these days, we both agree, the tick tock will finally, justly, begin to fade, and we’ll have a fine reason to raise a toast to the survivors, and to all of sports’ silence breakers.

(Photo courtesy of Ann Killion)