How to use awk to (sometimes) remove the first character of a column

I run a command and pipe it through awk as below :

mycommand | awk '{print $1,tolower($3),$4}

This gives me the following output:

fred.o: t .abcdefg 
fred.o: u .rstuvwxy 
fred.o: t .defghi 
fred.o: t .jklmnop 
fred.o: d abcdefg 
fred.o: d zyxwvuts 

As you can see the sometimes the third column contains a leading "." but not always.

How can I modify my awk command to get rid of the leading "." in the third column if it exists ? eg I would like my output to look like this :

fred.o: t abcdefg  
fred.o: u rstuvwxy  
fred.o: t defghi  
fred.o: t jklmnop  
fred.o: d abcdefg  
fred.o: d zyxwvuts