Maybe you missed the front page story in The Times-Picayune on a Sunday in early February. I wish I had.

It was this white-light glowing report on the comeback of City Park after the ravages of the levee breaches – thanks for the abject negligence Army Corps of Engineers -- that followed on the heels of Hurricane Katrina in late August of 2005.

Forget for a nanosecond that it painted the Park as a modern-day Lazarus almost 30 months after its death-by-drowning fact. (In contrast Lazarus was out the ground less than five days after some Judean coroner signed his death certificate.) The story raved about a remodeled concession stand inside the shuttered Casino building. Woo woo.

It said new bleachers are going up at Pan American Stadium. Be still my thumping heart.

And here comes the big one Elizabeth. It also said visitors soon will see more: a new -- and far bigger -- Ferris wheel at the amusement park, a rebuilt tennis complex, sidewalk repairs, new landscaping near the New Orleans Museum of Art and a massive replanting of Couturie Forest.

Oh by the way, it claimed heavy equipment was rumbling across battered fairways of the North Golf Course, preparing for a late-spring reopening.

That’s when I had to race for the garden hose. Isn’t that the proper course of action when your hair is on fire?

Well March 21, the day spring is annually sprung, is right around the corner. What isn’t is a grand opening for the North Course. How do I know? I have good eyes.

Twice in February I cruised past the North Course, taking a look-see at the hustle and bustle of getting what was a severely damaged course up to speed. Know what I saw? No hustle. No bustle.

As for heavy equipment rumbling, ha! It was a tractor cutting the Heinz 57 variety of grasses indigenous to the North Course’s deplorable fairways. Greens complexes were marked with the kind of tiny flags they used to show the location of balls buried in United States Open rough. Nary a blade of grass was in sight.

Curious sort that I am, I asked a local greens superintendent about the prospects of beautiful putting surfaces miraculously springing up out of the ground like, well, our Biblical buddy Lazarus.

“Well they could have grass by sometime in June,’’ he said. “It could grow up, but it wouldn’t spread out.’’

What he meant was the root system wouldn’t be strong and therefore the putting surfaces would hairy. Cutting them too soon would be a crapshoot that could interfere with any growth possibilities.

But any way the powers that be cut it, the North Course, without a complete overhaul that includes modern drainage, will remain what it always was, an uninteresting goat ranch of a golf course with little variety or appeal.

As for the East and West courses, there are grandiose plans for the future. Trouble is the Crescent City’s public golfers, players who have been transformed into nomads by the dearth of facilities within the city limits, would love for the future to be RIGHT NOW. The East and West in the here and now look like leftovers from Three Mile Island or the Love Canal. That is to say, overgrown, hideous, tragic etc., etc. What a shame and how shameful.

Everyone worth his salt knows what drove City Park pre-Katrina and what will drive it again, someday in a time that seems so damned far, far away. It sure isn’t that remodeled concession stand or some shrubbery near NOMA. And I’m fairly certain it won’t be tennis or a Ferris wheel either.

The Park’s economic engine is a four-letter word: G-O-L-F. But it should be fairly obvious to those handling the Park’s purse strings, but face facts. They can’t see the forest for the tees.

Matter fact, the deep thinkers got this renewal project backassward. Golf should have been the first aspect of the Park to get up and running. Sure it would require time, money and perhaps some creative thinking regarding financing. But I’d bet my bottom dollar there were helping hands out there (think USGA, PGA Tour and PGA of America for starters) who got have gotten the ball rolling had anyone bothered to ask.

The way I see it, the lights may be on at the Park, but there isn’t a deep thinker at home. Had a City Park golf project started 18 months ago, public golf in New Orleans just might be alive and well today.

That’s certainly no way to describe it now though. Practically dead and gone is more like it.

There’s Audubon Park Golf Club, the wonderful executive course make-over that City Park’s South Course should have copied rather than closed, and Brechtel Park, a neglected stepchild in Algiers.

Otherwise it’s get in the car and go. Public golfers deserve better. What we got was far, far worse. And that’s a hose job of a different ilk.