Courtesy Boston Globe

(March 12, 2010) Perhaps such grace should be expected from a one-time Olympic figure skater. Still, it strikes you as remarkable that a week after her dismissal from Channel 4, Alice Cook has managed to maintain the sunny personality familiar to viewers since her on-air debut in January 1985, which came three months after her arrival at the station as a producer.

Not that it’s been easy for the 54-year-old mother of three, who finished 12th in pairs at the 1976 Olympics in Innsbruck. It never is when you’ve been blindsided.

“It’s been a little up and down, but for the most part good,’’ said Cook, who was let go in the station’s latest purge of institutional memory Friday morning. “The initial shock of it was hard.

“But in the long run, there’s a lot of good things that can come out of it. So I’m doing all right for the most part, though the timing was really unexpected.

“Twenty-five and a half years, that’s a good run. I have to keep reminding myself. I’m one of the few people I know that hadn’t ever been laid off from a job. So I feel pretty fortunate. Especially in this business.’’

Cook, whose contract was to expire July 1, recognizes that what happened is hardly unusual nowadays; the paring of accomplished and well-known reporters and personalities has become a cruel reality in a business that struggles to maintain viewers in a new media world.

A similar fate ended the Channel 4 career of one of the men who hired Cook, legendary sports anchor Bob Lobel, two years ago. More recently, Channel 25 parted ways with well-known sports anchor Butch Stearns in November.

Cook was not atop the sports department depth chart at Channel 4, which now includes just sports anchors/reporters Steve Burton and Dan Roche. But that didn’t make the dark moment of truth, when she was called to human resources upon her arrival at work Friday, any less staggering.

“I don’t know what the protocol is and I don’t want to get into it, but a week before that, [medical reporter] Mallika Marshall was kind of dismissed the same way, so when I got the call to go, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is it,’ ’’ Cook said.

“I didn’t really have a chance to say goodbye to everyone.’’

There is a chance Cook will work in a free-lance capacity during the upcoming Patriots season for Channel 4; she has played a significant role in the station’s coverage of the team for nearly a decade, and a variation of that role was offered to her upon her dismissal.

But she is uncertain whether she will accept. A source close to the situation said the station does not expect her to.

“All of this stuff is getting thrown at you very quickly,’’ said Cook, “and they understood when I said, ‘I just need to get out of the building and think about things.’ A million things go through your mind.’’

Cook made it clear she wasn’t ready to write her professional obituary, though reflection came easily.

She remembered covering the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding soap opera at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics as a highlight because she uncovered numerous meaningful details despite having “zero’’ access.

She recalled her first on-air appearance, a story on the firing of Bruins coach Gerry Cheevers in 1984.

She considers herself a relative pioneer as a woman in the sports department, not to mention an even cruder environment: the locker room.

“It was brutal in the beginning,’’ she said. “I tell people, ‘Skating in the Olympics, you think that’s scary? Try going into the Patriots locker room.’ It was so unnerving for me in the beginning that I physically felt ill before I’d go into the Red Sox clubhouse or the Patriots locker room.

“I think, even until this day, one of the hardest jobs in journalism is being a female sports reporter. Even after all of the progress, there’s still a certain toughness you have to have, a certain way you have to carry yourself. And certainly in the beginning, never making a mistake, because then you’re just a dumb female. There was a lot of pressure there.’’

As she sees it, there have been three phases to her career.

“When I first started, it was the great ’80s, the glory days of TV,’’ she said, “and I started as a producer and then became a reporter. Stations were spending money. There were only four stations, and it was really the heyday of local news.

“Then in the ’90s, when sports was really slow around here, I had all my kids. And that kind of worked out well because the teams weren’t that good and there wasn’t a lot of travel and I was able to manage.

“Then we got to the last 10 years, and my kids were all school-age and all this great stuff happened in Boston sports. So my kids were in school all day and became more independent, and at the same time we had four Super Bowls, two World Series, the NBA championship, and it was a decade probably that we’ll never see again in terms of success. My kids got to see their mom cover some pretty cool things.

“So that’s it. The three phases.’’

The obvious question: Will there be a fourth phase for Alice Cook in the Boston sports media?

“Oh, I still have some dreams,’’ she said, that familiar optimism shining through. “Stay tuned. Stay tuned.’"

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