We were punked Duped. Pranked. Hoodwinked.

On Page A10 of last Sunday’s paper, we ran a photo of two guys digging a car out of deep snow left by last weekend’s storm.

Our photographer, a veteran shooter working in blizzard conditions, asked the men their names that Saturday, then asked them to confirm the spellings.

It didn’t take long Sunday for us to realize one of the men had played a joke on us. The false name he gave us looks legit in print but, when said aloud quickly, is sexually suggestive.

It’s fair to say most of our readers didn’t notice it, but some did. The calls and e-mails to our employees started Sunday and only picked up all week as news of the prank spread to joke and news-of-the-weird Web sites far and wide.

Little did we know before Sunday that these types of sophomoric name gags are the thing to do nowadays. Print and TV media outlets far and wide report being duped by a variety of similar stunts in recent years.

The Charleston, S.C., paper even fell for this while covering a pro golf event. A protester who was escorted from the course gave reporters the same name our prankster gave us. The reporter who fell for it later wrote a column about how using the fake name nearly overshadowed everything else he’d ever done.

We can relate.

The two names that made up the joke were searched more than 3,500 times on our Web site last week, by far the most-searched words on our site in recent history.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Turns out the life of the other man in the photo who gave us his real name has changed, too.

Gene Masseth, pictured alongside the man who duped us, has been hearing from anyone he ever knew since the photo ran.

“Everybody all over the United States is calling me,” he said, chuckling.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Masseth’s name was the most-searched term in a 48-hour-period on Google late last week by people trying to find the photo and caption. A 43-year-old working man from Fargo who just went outside to dig out his daughter’s car last Saturday was for two days the most-searched name on the world’s biggest Internet search engine.

“It’s unbelievable,” Masseth said Friday. “It just snowballed.”

Perhaps more bizarre is that Masseth doesn’t know the prankster, either.

“I have no idea who he is. I helped him shovel out of his spot and he helped me.”

Masseth said he, too, fell for the joke. He said the man gave the name in a straight face and didn’t fill him in on the joke after our photographer left.

“I asked him if that was really his name, because it sounded different, and he said it was. He had me fooled, too.”

Masseth said he’ll keep a few editions of the paper that afforded him 15 minutes of fame.

“I think it’s pretty funny,” he said. “But I feel bad for the guy (photographer). He was just doing his job – it was freezing out there.”

As for the newspaper: We’ll try to learn from this and work harder to keep it from happening again, but we can’t make any promises. We don’t make people prove who they are.

For now, the joke’s on us. It stings a little, but we’re trying to laugh through it.