Foot Locker Turned a Profit. I'm Watching the Floor.

The first clean quarter under Dick's looks like a turnaround. The real question is who gets to come along for it.

The Foot Locker number landed Wednesday, and I’ve been thinking about it longer than I expected to.

This was Dick’s first full quarter with Foot Locker folded all the way into the business, and the top line did what everyone assumed it would. Consolidated net sales came in at $5.16 billion, up 62.7 percent from $3.17 billion a year ago. Almost all of that jump is just Foot Locker showing up on the ledger for the first time. Net income was $319.82 million, $3.54 a share, or $2.90 on an adjusted basis.

The core Dick’s business, the one that was already humming long before any of this, kept humming. Comparable sales grew 6 percent, and Lauren Hobart was quick to note that the 6 percent sat on top of a 4.5 percent increase last year and a 5.3 percent increase the year before. That segment ran a double-digit operating margin. Nobody was worried about Dick’s. Dick’s was never the question.

Foot Locker was the question. And on the surface, Foot Locker answered it. But the truth needs some decoding to understand.