There are those who swear I showed up at the Bates College protest in pajamas. Liars, the lot of them. They were sweat pants and I will stick to that story until my dying day.

It was around midnight, and years ago, when hundreds of Bates students stormed the school president’s home. They were protesting a recent sexual assault and they were loud. They were angry. Cops from two cities as well as the state and the county were called to quell the uprising.

It was big news.

With a fistful of notes scribbled at the scene, I arrived in the newsroom close to 1 a.m. The editors waited hungrily. This was a hot story and they wanted it on the front page. This would require some wee hour trickery.

Out in the pressroom, a crew huddled around machinery like NASA engineers overseeing a launch. Paper flew along the rolls and it needed to be stopped. We needed to start over again to make room for the big news.

I thought about it. I stammered. I stood mute. I said nothing. An editor mumbled to the press foreman. The presses were stopped and the words were never uttered.

They say a “stop the press” event at a newspaper is among the most thrilling in the world of journalism. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never genuinely seen one.

“It’s a moment of huge excitement,” said 28-year Sun Journal veteran Heather McCarthy. “It’s when you feel the most connected to what you do.”

From what I understand, those events big enough to warrant a scream across the pressroom are more common in Hollywood than in any newsroom. These days, press crews quietly change plates or re-do pages at the instruction of an editor.

“I’ve stopped the presses before,” said editor Pete Phelan. “I’ve never gone out and actually yelled it.”

Yet, from time to time, it does happen. Veterans of the news game will instantly remember exactly how events led them to the most famous three words ever uttered in the history of newspapers.

It was spring of 1989 and the Tiananmen Square protests galvanized the world. The Sun Journal, like every other paper in the country, was leading with a huge photo of students standing before giant Chinese tanks.

A good plan. Only the giant, dramatic photo didn’t allow for the development of other breaking news. There was no space above the fold on the front page.

“At about 10 o’clock that night, we heard the Ayatollah had died,” said Carol Coultas, a former Sun Journal editor and now a reporter. “It was a big deal. I ran out back and yelled, Stop the presses! Stop! Stop!’ They knew me out there. They knew that if I was there with panic in my eyes, something big was going on.”

Ah, the big one. Two major events colliding on one day to create a concoction of adrenaline, horror and fearlessness on the news desk. So energizing. So intense.

Sometimes, it’s the nickel-and-dime stuff that sends an otherwise composed journalist screaming for the pressroom.

Rex Rhoades, executive editor and intrepid chief, remembers his “stop the press” moment less fondly. He was at a different newspaper then. There was a problem with the city water supply and the newspaper was publishing a list of things people could do to protect themselves. One suggestion was that they put a tablespoon of Clorox into their water.

Or was it a teaspoon?

It was a teaspoon. The reporter caught his error late in the evening and alerted Rex. Misstating how much of a chemical a person should place in his drinking water is not the kind of mistake a newspaper wants to make.

“We didn’t know how it might affect people,” Rex said. “It was a panic.”

So they stopped the presses, fixed the error and put out the paper. Rex had his moment without the grand news story that typically accompanies such an event.

Sportswriter Kevin Mills was at The Boston Globe when Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson in 1990. An editor who first heard the news vaulted a row of filing cabinets and ordered the presses stopped. It was a big moment in news history.

“I missed it,” Mills says. “I was down in the library looking for some old clips.”

In the movie “The Paper,” characters played by Randy Quaid and Michael Keaton stand beside the giant presses just before ordering the crews to shut it down.

“Aren’t you going to say it?” Quaid says. “You gotta say it.”

Keaton shouts it out. It’s a dramatic moment.

For pressmen, getting through each night is a matter of sweat and worry rather than drama and romantic lines. Randy Baril has been in the production department for 20 years at the Sun Journal. He’s seen the presses stopped many times for various reasons. Yet, not once has he witnessed the delivery of that famous line.

“Those are three words I’ve never heard,” Baril said.

Baril took me out to the pressroom to see THE BIG RED BUTTON used to stop the press. In truth, the button isn’t all that big. And anyway, a crewman tells me it would not be used if an editor came out to order the presses stopped – the red button is for emergencies. Simple things like breaking news require only a manual shutdown.

When the time comes and I get to yell it out, chances are you’ll never know about it. You’ll simply squint through the story in the morning and mutter about my sloppy writing. Fair enough, I suppose. You don’t know when I show up for breaking events in my pj’s, either. Because I don’t.

Those were sweat pants!