Before I pulled my first operation with the UM Patriots as an undercover reporter, Kevin Irrer looked me in the eyes and said, "If we don't like you, we won't call you again."

I laughed. He wasn't kidding.

Thirty minutes earlier, I was told to meet a man in the corridor outside of the art gallery in the Duderstadt Center on North Campus. My contact told me nothing about the upcoming operation, except to come alone and not to look suspicious.

About a week before that, at about 3:30 on a Tuesday morning, I woke up to an impossible phone call, the kind of call that starts the long, slow thrill of a spy movie.

The person on the other line coughed directly into the phone before grunting "Hello?" I didn't recognize the number.

"This is Kevin from the UM Patriots," he said. "You called me earlier today. Tomorrow is National Pirate Day. We're going to make a grappling hook and fly a pirate flag from the Graduate Library. Do you want in?" He couldn't have been more articulate, but I still had no idea what he was talking about.

After the group's iconic run through the Fishbowl, during which Blinky chased Pac Man through the rows of computers, all of campus wanted to know who was beneath the costumes. I had gotten his phone number the previous day from another photographer and left a message for the Patriots, but they didn't call back, and I more or less forgot about it.

And so I did what any reasonable person would do with an exam scheduled for the next evening and an impossible caller on the phone - I told "Kevin" that I was probably dreaming the conversation and to please call me the following day to prove he did indeed exist.

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If the Running of the Pac Man was held 20 years ago, those fortunate enough to be sitting in the Fishbowl would have told their friends, and later, maybe their kids if they decided to come to the University, but it would have stopped there. Today, you can all see the prank thanks to digital video, cheap film editing programs and YouTube.com.

And many of us have. Their pranks have been viewed nearly 15,000 times on YouTube. The Pac Man stunt has been imitated (poorly) by students at the University of Washington. The Ann Arbor group has a fan group on Facebook that includes Michigan football star LaMarr Woodley and 21 other members. Its website (www.umpatroits.com) has six different pranks you can see and has been getting solid traffic since it was first uploaded.

But now the group faces the same mind-numbing task as any group of artists: How do you top your prior success? Then how do you top that one? How do you form a group that will stay fresh after the founders graduate? And what's probably the most interesting question of all: Why the hell are you doing this?

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Back to North Campus.

I asked around until I found the art museum and tried to look like an engineer. Two men were standing outside over a cardboard box. They looked pleasantly suspicious. I walked over and said the password they instructed me to use, which was, "Hey, are you guys from UM Patriots?"

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the front row of an Engineering 101 lecture at the Chrysler Center, trying to keep my camera hidden. A person to the left of me paged through a magazine. The students in the row behind me all seemed to be learning how to spin their pens. The professor was plugging his laptop into the projector with one hand and holding a silver thermos with the other. None of them could have been prepared for what came next.

Kevin, dressed inconspicuously in the white shirt of an Orkin bug exterminator, came out of a back entrance and aimed his flashlight at the cracks in the wall next to me. The Orkin logos on his helmet and shirt, which had looked like they were printed off the Internet when I saw them close up just minutes earlier, looked completely real from my new vantage point. At that moment, it all hinged on the professor.

He took a sip of his coffee and said into his microphone, "Wow, that's pretty bad - looking for bugs in a programming class." It wasn't a bad joke and it meant that the professor bought the disguise.

The class quieted down and the lecture began. The professor started talking about the homework assignment, which many students were finding too difficult, as the clandestine Patriots in the audience readied their video cameras. The trap was set.

A pretty girl sitting near the aisle shot up from her seat, "Orkin Man, look out!" The class turned from her to Kevin, but her cry came too late. A man dressed as a giant bug ran from the back door and landed on Kevin's back. Their struggle was epic, twisting back and forth until the bug got the best of Kevin, throwing him to the ground near the lectern. The fake punches kept coming. It looked as if the bug would exterminate the Orkin Man, but Kevin reached into his utility belt, pulled out a spray can and doused the bug with what was presumably enough poison to kill a horse.