Coming off an unprecedented fourth straight PGA Tour playoff — this time wrapped up on one of America’s iconic holes with David Toms’ yanked putt to hand the prize to a steady but clearly emotional K.J. Choi — it’s easy to dwell on the many questions this year’s Players Championship left hanging in the sultry Florida air.

When will Tiger return?

What young guy (or older guy) will catch fire and emerge from the pack to rule the roost for a while?

Is this event, and the quirky Pete Dye golf course it’s played on, still overhyped, or do they rate up there among the big show’s best?

Who the heck knows?

So, let’s look forward to this week’s venerable stop at Colonial, Ben Hogan’s old haunt. Not because it’s got a strong field even on the heels of the stress-inducing Players (including Toms, looking to atone for his near-miss), but because it calls to mind an epochal stretch in the world of competitive golf, back in 2003, when Annika Sorenstam was on the cusp of perhaps her greatest winning run.

On this very week eight years ago, at Colonial, she stepped off the LPGA schedule to accept an invitation to tee it up with the guys.

We loved it, and said so. About damn time, we argued. She was obviously as fine a player as there was on the planet at that time, male or female. She deserved a shot at making the cut, and while she came up short on that score, she finished ahead of 11 players and came away from the experience a better, more confident, more focused player. Which is saying something.

Turns out a lot of people didn’t agree with us. An editorial in the June 2003 issue of Fairways + Greens drew the ire of plenty of people who apparently don’t think the word “equality” belongs in golf. We got hammered.

That’s OK. We stood by Annika (and later Michelle Wie, who played a couple events on the PGA Tour including the Reno-Tahoe Open), and for her part — as she recently told us in a telephone interview — she’s still happy she did it.

“I would definitely do it again if I could turn back [the clock],” she said. “I look back on my career and that was one of the highlights, for many reasons. The experience was just incredible. I have some amazing memories, from the day said ‘Yes, I want to play,’ to the day I took the first swing in the opening round. I can hardly explain it: The people, the challenges, the nerves. I learned so much about myself. It really helped me moving forward. I had one my best years on the LPGA Tour after that event.”

There’s a lesson in those words for every golfer (and non-golfer, for that matter): Set ever-higher goals and turn a perceived failure into a springboard for better things. Turns out that missed cut was just what a top-of-her-game Annika needed to kick it up a notch.

She kept it up for the next two years, and by the spring of 2005 had won five straight events, dating to the previous season.

Now, as a retired LPGA star-turned-businesswoman who is “busier today than I’ve ever been,” that roll continues. Annika sets her mind to something, and does it, whether it’s working with Northern California’s Wente Vineyards to bottle a fine syrah or chardonnay, running her popular golf academies or putting her name on a fragrance.

One gets the feeling she can hold her own with the guys in the boardroom, too.

**READ THE JUNE 2005 FG COVER FEATURE ON ANNIKA SORENSTAM**