The TV was on in the background while folks in the newsroom buzzed around being busy or trying to look like it. Then we heard words that made our heads snap up in unison: something about the G-20 leaders liking Pittsburgh so much they just might come back for another meeting.

The report was unattributed and highly speculative, not to say doubtful. Still, at that moment a collective groan rose up, punctuated by guffaws, eye-rolls, "oh, great" and "kill me now."

Nobody was commenting on the amount of work involved in covering another such gathering. Journalists live for big stories, and reporters love the smell of tear gas in the morning.

But speaking as a citizen, I like my town open for business rather than clamped down with vise grips and overtaken by the ethos of a police state.

If hosting a body of international leaders means closing almost all of Downtown, bringing in enough armed, riot-clad police to put down an uprising in a Soviet gulag, arresting journalists who are simply doing their jobs, declaring a nonviolent gathering of Pitt students to be an "unlawful assembly" hours after all the dignitaries have left, ordering them to vacate their own campus, tear-gassing and corralling them and other innocent bystanders when they're trying to comply and then arresting them for not complying -- well, I'll take a pass on a repeat, thanks.

Surely this is not the inevitable price for focusing international attention on Pittsburgh's charms, demonstrating how far the region has come under adverse circumstances and raising its profile on the world stage. The cost in terms of lost civil liberties was much higher than it needed to be, and city officials can't just sweep that under the rug.

It may not be fair to compare Pittsburgh with Washington, D.C., where high-level gatherings are commonplace and officials are practiced in dealing with them. But somehow, the nation's capital manages to have international leaders visit without shutting down the city. Downtown is not closed to traffic every time the president meets with foreign dignitaries. The entire fleet of public buses isn't rerouted through two check points. And with all the protest marches and demonstrations that take place on the National Mall, the city somehow keeps operating.

When Pittsburgh figures out how to be more like that and less like it was on Sept. 24 and 25, then we'll be ready to host another world-stage event.

It is true, as various leaders have said, that police in some cases showed restraint, refusing to take the bait when protesters taunted them and got up in their faces. But it's also true that in other cases they went way over the top. I'm still waiting for Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, Public Safety Director Michael Huss, District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. or University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Mark Nordenberg to say as much, but something tells me I'll be waiting a long time.

Of the 190 people arrested during the summit, 51 were Pitt students. If I were a Pitt parent, I'd expect the chancellor to be making a public call for police accountability. They were on his campus roughing up his students at an assembly that was legal and nonviolent until the police stormed in and declared it unlawful, for reasons that remain a mystery. Shouldn't the well-being of those students be his first concern?

It's good that our international visitors had such a great time, but how did the party end on such a sour note for the locals? Was it an outgrowth of Pittsburgh's inferiority complex, with city leaders so eager to prove themselves that the concept of "overkill" lost all meaning? Did we wind up looking like the nervous host who's so afraid his guests won't like him that he makes his family miserable?

I know, I know, hindsight is 20/20. But in this age it's also on video clips. Anybody with an Internet connection can view scene after scene from that night at Pitt, captured by students, protesters, journalists and other observers. A lot of it isn't pretty.

Of course the city had to be prepared when the security of world leaders was at stake, especially considering the 1999 riots in Seattle. But with 6,000 police and soldiers at the ready, it takes cool-headed leaders to ensure they solve problems rather than create them.

Mr. Zappala has dropped charges against some of those arrested at Pitt that night, acknowledging that people may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the time this sees print, he may have done so in additional cases. The shame of it is that so many charges were brought in the first place. "Arrest everyone and sort it out later" is not a sound public policy for a democracy.

A reader sent me an e-mail last week commenting on the G-20's effect on the local citizenry.

"If they ever think of doing this again, could they please go to the Bedford Springs Hotel instead?" he wrote. "It's nicely isolated so as not to disturb anyone, near Camp David, so the Pres could just come by helicopter, etc."

Not a bad idea. But I'm not quite that down on hosting other world gatherings here -- if, that is, we've learned the right lessons from our mistakes. Acknowledging them is the first step. Until then, this town is not ready for another close-up.

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