Welcome back, WOLO.

Just in case you missed the news in the hubbub of the Fourth of July weekend, WOLO-TV 25 announced its local newscast is moving back to Columbia after three years of broadcasting from Charlotte. The ABC affiliate will broadcast from a Main Street studio across from the State House beginning in October.

So let Talk be the first to officially greet our wayward friends as they prepare to return.

You may remember that back in 2002 we wrote a mocking column when WOLO began broadcasting from Charlotte. The piece centered on a couple of airhead anchors, Biff Stiffhair and Ditzi Rougecheeks, spending the entire Columbia newscast talking about how much better things were in Charlotte.

Well, naturally, that was just a joke, ha ha. And we were simply pointing out that a true Columbia anchor team should actually deliver the news from, uh, Columbia. As a way of showing there are no hard feelings, we dialed up WOLO co-anchor Shanai Harris about her impending return to the Capital City.

Harris was most gracious in accepting our welcome. And she claimed to be thrilled about returning.

“Of course, Columbia is my home,” she said. “I’m really excited about it. We all are.”

Harris, a Keenan High graduate, is glad to be back for another reason. She admits the central-casting aspect could be confusing to some viewers, who may or may not have understood that she was sitting in Charlotte.

“You had to constantly explain it,” she said.

Harris is most definitely excited about the new Columbia studio location.

“It will be a turn-on that we’ll be in the hub of the city,” she said.

(Let’s just hope that a bunch of state legislators don’t start showing up on the set, waving their arms and shouting “Hi, Mom!” in the background of the newscasts.)

Harris was way too diplomatic to compare Columbia and Charlotte for us. In fact, she insisted it never comes up.

“Nobody has ever asked me if I liked Charlotte better than Columbia,” she said.

All right, we’ll let you off the hook and answer that one for you, Shanai. Columbia’s better.

But she did concede there are stylistic differences between the two places.

“Columbia is a more create-your-own-pace city,” she said. “It’s very family-friendly. It’s not the high-energy, go-go-go (pace) like you have in larger cities, and that is refreshing. It’ll be nice to shift down a gear.”

Now that’s a fair answer.

Talk also attempted to contact Reg Taylor, the longtime WOLO meteorologist, to see if he is going to make the trek back down I-77 as well.

(We go way back with Reg. He served as one of our fellow judges at a few Columbia Historic Foundation chili cook-offs. More than once, Reg and Talk were chased to our cars by ladle-wielding chefs angry that their chili didn’t win the competition.)

But Harris told us Reg was on vacation. Hey, that figures. He’ll probably come back with yet another new hairdo.

We’d love to see Reg return with Shanai. We even promised her that we wouldn’t poke any more fun at WOLO.

“Hey, are you the one who called me Ditzi Rougecheeks?” said Harris.

Uh, well, yes, we did write that. But Ditzi wasn’t you, Shanai. She was a composite character representing one of those lame Charlotte anchors. You do a fine job.

We’re not the only one to think that either. Harris said she ran into a little old lady over the past weekend during a visit to Columbia who offered this message.

“She said, ‘You sure can read the news.’ That made me feel great,” Harris said.

And Talk feels great that she’s going to be reading it in Columbia again.