PHILADELPHIA - Apparently, you can go home again after you've torched the place, if only for an hour a week by telephone.

Keith Olbermann, the ESPN "SportsCenter" pioneer who famously left the channel in 1997 amid a firestorm of bad feelings and nasty remarks, is rejoining his old partner Dan Patrick on Patrick's daily ESPN Radio show.

Starting Aug. 5, Olbermann will call in every Friday for a one-hour segment on Patrick's afternoon radio show. The reunion isn't quite the same as putting them back in action on "SportsCenter," where they redefined TV sports news in the mid-1990s and helped establish the ESPN sensibility more than any of the channel's live game coverage.

Still, it's a huge baby step over what at times has seemed an irreparable rift between Olbermann and ESPN. He'd left critiquing ESPN management and co-workers for everything from creating a poisonous work environment to not getting his sense of humor. His name and likeness were almost completely obliterated from the official records when ESPN celebrated its 25th anniversary last summer.

"Was I wrong about a lot of things? Damn wrong," he said. Olbermann wrote an apology called "ESPN: Mea Culpa" for Salon.com in 2002.

"Nearly everybody at ESPN merits an apology from me, and I give it willingly and with great sadness," he wrote.

He's particularly remorseful about a 2000 book by Mike Freeman, "ESPN: The Uncensored History," which gives such an insider account of Olbermann's complaints that some people thought he ghost-wrote it. He says Freeman never misquoted him nor took him out of context, but "there are things (Olbermann said in the book) that I've gone back, looked at, and not just cringed but gotten nauseous."

Time heals, though, and apologies help. He and Patrick remained friends, mostly by e-mail, and "when the opportunity arose, you see how easily the bridge was rebuilt," he said.

Don't expect Olbermann's role at ESPN to expand. He will continue to host and almost single-handedly write "Countdown," his entertaining nightly show on MSNBC. An hour a week for radio "is about what I have time to do, and I might even be stretching it."