A dame in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

Never happened before.

But why not? Didn't Golda Meier and Indira Gandhi stand out among the guys in their precincts? So here is her historic self, Lesley Candace Visser, on the last leg of a pilgrimage to the pigskin shrine at Canton, Ohio. There, today, she will crash the male bastion of punts, passes and prayers and be anointed as a full-fledged representative of National Football League sainthood. I can envision Mother Teresa giving her high-fives.

This is as close to canonization as you can get in these United States, taking bows at the game's Vatican - moreover being yet among the living.

It is not something Visser, a journalistic paragon -- Brenda Starr with microphone? -- dreamed of as little boys do. She didn't picture herself spiritually rooming with such Famers as Bronko Nagurski, Crazy Legs Hirsch, Bruiser Kinard, Night Train Lane, Bulldog Turner, Broadway Joe Namath, Johnny Blood, Greasy Neale, Mean Joe Greene or Slingin' Sammy Baugh.

Nevertheless it has happened to lovely, lively Lesley, Globe alumna and a mainstay of CBS-TV Sports. As the winner of the Rozelle Award -- named for the late NFL prelate, Pope Alvin (Pete) Rozelle -- she enters the Hall's babbling/scribbling wing. Sounds like a fairy tale: Lesley as Snow White amid 220-not-so-dwarfish guys, genderly de-segregating the Hall.

Having covered countless upsets, she is now one of them.

"The Pro Football Hall of Fame!" She laughs and shrieks over the phone from a Florida home she shares with another respected voice of American gamesplaying, husband Dick Stockton. "I still have a problem believing it. But I'll show up."

So will I. Why else in the world should anybody journey to Canton, Ohio? But once you've known Lesley, and found her irresistible, you'd climb on a bus to anywhere in her direction. Lewis and Clark would have followed her the way they trailed Sacajawea, entranced by her trailblazing zest. Pioneering is nothing new to the new kid on the Hall of Fame block. As a young Globie, fresh out of Boston College, she was assigned to cover everything from local schoolboy football to our town's professional teams. Soon, obviously equipped with a bright outlook and writing talent, she branched out to bowl games, the US Open, NCAA basketball. National and international stuff. But it could be a frustrating, demeaning obstacle course. How were you supposed to do the job fully if you couldn't get into the sanctums, the lockerrooms, and reap the quotes and feelings?

Off-limits to women. Even though she had the mettle of Calamity Jane, she wasn't about to come on with guns blazing. Mata Hari couldn't have charmed her way into some of those male retreats. It took bravery, patience, determination, diplomacy, a sharp sense of humor to earn reportorial equality as barriers bent, then fell. She was a leader for women who loved sports and grew up wanting to write the scene.

"I was business-like. I knew the questions I had to ask. Asked them and got out fast, appreciating that I was pioneering. But," Lesley recalls, "it was a class in humiliation to be out on the frontier, wading through insults and indignities as one of the female reporters handling the same assignments as men. Lockerrooms included.

"Not just the athletes, but the supposed grown-ups, the coaches, gave us a hard time. At the 1980 Cotton Bowl game, Bill Yeomans, the Houston coach, march-pushed me out of the lockerroom, even though it was against the rules. I was clearly accredited, and I was doing my job.

"He was yelling, 'I don't give a damn about the Equal Rights Amendment - get ouuuut!'

"I walked to the top of the stadium, sat down and cried my heart out. But I got over it.

"The next year, down South again, after the Alabama-Auburn game in Birmingham, I thought I'd have trouble with the great [Alabama coach] Bear Bryant. He was standing at the lockerroom door. I braced myself, but he smiled. 'Come on in, I don't give a damn.' We had a couple of Jack Daniel's later, and the Bear was delightful."

First clubhouse penetrated? Walter Brown Arena in 1978. An understanding Bob Kraft, now owner of a football team, but then apprenticing in sports as proprietor of the Boston Lobsters, welcomed her to the tennis players' boudoirs.

"Yes, satisfyingly, eventually we were accepted," says she, a patron saint of the typing sisterhood who would become some of the boys.

The six boys accompanying her as the Hall's Class of 2006 are Troy Aikman, Harry Carson, Reggie White, Rayfield Wright, Warren Moon and the ebullient John Madden. Madden, repeating, this time on his coaching credentials, has also received the Rozelle Award.

Visser feels "lucky" to have been hired off the campus by Dave Smith, who transformed the Globe sports pages to high-status. Also to be guided by his successor, Vince Doria. She, like everybody else, misses the departed Will McDonough, a mentor who knew more about pro football than the people whose business it is.

"We had so much fun at the Globe, Dan Shaughnessy, Bob Ryan and I starting out pretty much together." That was before TV beckoned, to be rewarded with that rarity, an interviewer who knows how to ask real questions. Another fortunate rarity in the capricious TV jungle: she's had the same fine producer, Eric Mann, in all her CBS years.

Only two interviewees made her nervous: Ted Williams and Michael Jordan. It didn't show. "Michael sensed it, and said, beforehand, 'Lesley, I'll get you through this.' "

She keeps getting through nicely, expertly, hearing approvingly from a lot of folks. "Most importantly our kids in Iraq who get the broadcasts. What they're going through is humbling to us in sports. They love sports and I hope we bring them some enjoyment. I haven't lost my love, I think because it's unscripted. You can't know what's next."

Although spending some formative years as a girl in Wyoming, Ohio, she was "always a Red Sox fan. When the family moved to the Boston area it was heaven hearing Curt Gowdy on my transistor radio, doing the games. Aaron Boone's home run in 2003 paralyzed me, but it worked out the year after, didn't it. I was first a Patriots fan in the Italian era - Cappelletti, Parilli, Buoniconti.

"I remember a Patriots-Raiders game in 1964 at Fenway Park when we were on the field after it ended. Suddenly I was standing next to Jim Otto, the Raiders' center. I had never seen anybody so huge [6-2, 260]. I couldn't imagine that someday I'd be working with guys like that." A Hall-mate no less.

This story could be a book - but she should write it. I hope she does, called "I've Only Just Begun Again." You might suspect that I'm crazy about Lesley, of whom Italian writer, Gianni Clerici, says, "She has the most beautiness (cq) legs in our business."

However, she stood me up once. We were supposed to double-team the 1983 Masters tennis in New York. No Lesley. Why?

"I'm getting married. You should come."

My retort: "Bad scheduling, kid. Somebody has to cover this. I'll come to your next wedding." It didn't happen. She and Dick blissfully remain Mr. and Mrs. Cathode Ray Tube.

I knew the night we met in 1972, at a basketball game, she'd get up in the world. As a Boston College cheerleader she was being tossed again and again by her colleagues toward the ceiling like an infield fly. I held my breath. Fortunately for her and the rest of us, the catchers didn't have butterfingers.