By Mike Vaccaro

We want to break your refresh button. These items that’ll be sprouting up on this blog over the next few days, weeks, months, years? We want them to become your new caffeine, your new Sudoku, your new I-tunes, all the benign addictions that prevent us from doing real work and spending any semblance of quality time with friends and family.

In other words, the very reason why the Internet exists. Before we go too much further, let’s get this out of the way right at the top:

Most newspaper blogs? They aren’t very good. To put it bluntly, they stink. They stink like the sixth day of a garbage strike. They stink like the re-make of “All the Kings Men,” like “Lucky Louie,” like most of Pearl Jam’s albums after “Vs.” If they were coaches, they’d be a cross between Art Howe and Rich Kotite. Owned, of course, by James Dolan.

Here’s why:

The people who write newspaper blogs aren’t really bloggers. They pretend to be, or they’re ordered to pretend to be. But their hearts aren’t in it. And that, as much as anything, is what the best blogs and the best bloggers are all about: heart. You can Google up about a thousand Springsteen blogs, and you know what? The best ones are the ones with the worst punctuation, the worst sense of style and almost no literate transitions. Yet you’ll plow through a 6,000-word screed on the relative merits of “Johnny 99” and be left begging for more.

Why? Heart. Bloggers blog because they can think of nothing else they’d rather be doing. No one assigns them to do it. They have an uncontrollable need to get something off their minds, out of their hearts, and onto the world wide web. So they do it, dammit. Those are the sites you keep coming back to, again and again and again, wearing out the refresh button on your laptop.

Well, that and online poker.

The one thing we can promise you about these blogs is that if they do wind up wasting your time, it’ll be time well wasted. You aren’t going to read anything about sprained ankles and dislocated shoulders and upset stomachs, the flotsam and jetsam that overflow from reporter’s notebooks but never quite make it into the newspaper. If it wasn’t important enough for us, why should it be important enough for you? If it bores us to tears typing it, it’ll be like Rohypnol to you while you try and read it. And where’s the fun in that?

No, you’ll want to visit here, and keep coming back here, because we’re going to let you borrow our eyes and our ears every day. Those are our greatest assets. Those of us who work in the Post sports department have won a very unique kind of lottery, one that grants us access to locker rooms and clubhouses, one that gets us into the kind of big events that most sports fans would mortgage their houses to be able to get into just once.

In the last 12 months, my own eyes and ears have taken me to the World Series, to the NCAA Tournament, to the NFL playoffs. They’ve taken me to press row at the Garden, to the press box at Yankee Stadium, and inside the ropes at the U.S. Open. They’ve burned with bubbly after Cliff Floyd popped a bottle of champagne two feet away. I wrote most of what I saw, and most of what I heard, but not all of it because there’s only so much space in a newspaper every day. But there’s nothing but space here in cyberspace.

That’s the ride we go on every day, every week, every year.

Starting today, we want you to call “Shotgun!” and come along with us. We’ll keep our hands on the wheel. You keep your finger on the refresh button.