Maria and Andre Jacquemetton's strange yet excellent adventure took them from relic hunting to bouncing beach babes (and boys) to the deck of the starship Enterprise before finally blowing them up onto the stage in L.A.'s Nokia Theatre in a puff of smoke last month to receive Emmys as writers on the TV show “;Mad Men.”;

And I knew them when. When? When life's road was about to get bumpy. So bumpy that we all got bumped as staff writers off “;Baywatch Hawaii.”; Actually, it was the show itself that got bumped off by “;Baywatch”; brass, and we were just collateral damage. I think that was in 2001. My memory is not good. I tend to gild memories with fanciful interpretations of events that eventually become real to me.

Like, in my mind I remember the cause of the fall of “;Baywatch Hawaii”; being that God looked down and saw that I was having more fun and making more money then I ever had in my life, and He said, “;Oh, my! We can't have that!”; and He smote “;Baywatch”; to death.

Andre and Maria might have a different take on it. In any case, we were cast adrift. I returned my full attention to this column, and Andre and Maria resumed their life journey as itinerant TV writers, decamping to Los Angeles, eventually landing jobs with the “;Star Trek”; prequel “;Enterprise.”;

And if that had been their final stop, it would have been a weird enough journey. They started writing together on the show “;Relic Hunter,”; about a globe-trotting university professor who, well, hunts relics. Then came the cultural shift from relics to hunks (and babes) as writers on “;Baywatch Hawaii.”; And then to end up writing on a sci-fi space show ... well, all that takes some creative flexibility.

But after just a year on “;Enterprise,”; they found themselves out of the business, up north where Maria taught writing at the Vancouver Film School. And there they would have languished had it not been for a friendship made 20 years before in an L.A. group of struggling writers that included Matt Weiner.

“;While we were on 'Star Trek,' Matt was on 'Becker' and he wrote a pilot,”; Maria said. “;We told him if he ever got the show going, we would love to work on it.”;

The pilot Weiner had written was “;Mad Men,”; about the hard-drinking, hard-smoking life of 1960s advertising men in Manhattan. But the pilot would be grounded for years while Weiner was supervising producer for “;The Sopranos”; and Maria and Andre raised their two kids, Luke, 11, and Tia, 6, in Vancouver.

But Tony Soprano finally hung up his gat, and Weiner pitched “;Mad Men”; to AMC, whose motto is “;TV for movie people.”; AMC was mad for “;Mad Men.”; Weiner pulled the Jacquemettons into his writing fold, and two weeks ago the little smoky show became the first basic cable show to win an Emmy for best drama. And for writing, too.

Maria returns to Hawaii this weekend to run a TV writing workshop at the University of Hawaii. What do you tell new writers just setting out on their own trek?

“;That there are not really any rules to this business,”; she said. “;It is a lifelong journey. Who am I to bust somebody's dreams?”;

Andre will be at the workshop, too. Under duress, he says. “;Maria always insists I play the bad cop at these events,”; he said. “;I guess I'm the dream crusher.”;

He's half joking. Their main point is that it is a tough business, but sometimes God doesn't pull the cosmic rug out from underneath you.

“;You just can't give up,”; Maria said. “;Nobody was more 'over' than we were. And we just got an Emmy.”;