Let's call this what it is, before we even start the faux debate: Summertime "SportsCenter" filler.

Like the "Who's Now?" tournament that preceded it, ESPN's "TitleTown" competition is little more than something that'll eat up time between baseball highlights and non-NFL news while the Worldwide Leader in Sports waits for the Summer Olympics to kick off, training camps to open and pennant races to heat up.

And, the blog "Awful Announcing" poked fun of it awhile back.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I've yet to see an actual segment.

All that said, it seems to me that ESPN's "competition" between cities for the "TitleTown" title is harmless fun. Of course, maybe I'm biased since they asked me to be one of the so-called "experts" who helped narrow down the finalists.

There were 32 other non-"SportsCenter" folks on the panel -- I'm guessing the votes from anchors Stuart Scott, John Anderson, Steve Levy, Jay Harris, Brian Kenny, Chris McKendry, Neil Everett, Scott Van Pelt, Josh Elliott, John Buccigross, Stan Verrett and Linda Cohn carried slightly more weight than mine -- and we each received a nifty binder via FedEx last month full of essays written by fans in the nominated cities.

Or, maybe, fourth graders in those cities. It was hard to tell.

Given the group I was working with -- Dallas Morning News NFL columnist Rick Gosselin is one of my mentors in this business, while a number of other respected columnists (Jim Litke, Gwen Knapp, Peter Schmuck, Terence Moore and Steve Kelley among them) were also involved -- I took the job seriously. I did manage to read all of the essays -- no easy chore -- and cobble together my top 25.

Apparently, I missed a few. Green Bay received a bye into the finals because, well, it's the original "Titletown USA." (Anderson, who'll take a break from "Wipeout" on ABC to host the ESPN crew when it came to Green Bay for the Fourth of July, wrote a column on behalf of his hometown.)

Of the other 17 cities that earned a visit from ESPN -- two others are yet to be determined, as far as I can tell -- four failed to appear on my ballot. Here are the finalists named so far, with my ranking for each of those in parentheses:

Boston (1), 
Gainesville, Fla. (2), 
Los Angeles (4), 
San Francisco (5), 
Chicago (7), 
Lawrence, Kan. (8), 
Palo Alto, Calif. (9), 
Ann Arbor, Mich. (10), 
Columbus, Ohio (11), 
Louisville, Ky. (12), 
Chapel Hill, N.C. (13), 
Pittsburgh (15)
, Valdosta, Ga. (22), 
Parkersburg, W.V. (NR)
, Knoxville, Tenn. (NR), 
Williamsport, Pa. (NR), 
Detroit (NR), 
Green Bay (NA)

I have to admit, I was a little surprised that my third-ranked city (New York), my sixth-ranked city (Lexington, Ky.) and my 14th-ranked city (Dallas) failed to crack the group. I was also disappointed that Baltimore, which I included solely because the essayist pointed out that it had the worst drug epidemic and highest murder rate in the U.S., failed to make the cut.

Not that I'm completely shocked by those omissions. What I really can't believe is how this silly exercise has stoked in me a measure of civic pride.

As a semi-resident of suburban Titletown U.S.A., I'll actually be disappointed when "SportsCenter" bestows the title upon Boston before resuming regularly scheduled highlight programming. Or "Wipeout," if you prefer.