First, a classic high school story. My senior year, we scheduled North Chicago for homecoming. They were terrible our first three years of high school. The only school in the conference worse than us. We’d never won a single homecoming game, so we figured we got the jackpot with the Warhawks senior year.

We have the game in the bag. Then, with like 2:45 left, North Chicago’s running back busts out a 78-yard TD run on third down. Of course, that was Michael Turner. But I didn’t realize how good he was at the time (he was very lightly recruited), so I let out a torrent of F-bombs from the stands that could be heard on the game’s rebroadcast on Local Access TV. I also had a girl threaten to kick my ass because I kept going on and on about how much our football team sucked because we couldn’t win a homecoming game in four years. Basically, it was one of the legendary meltdowns of all time, and Michael Turner was entirely to blame.

Connection No. 2: A former co-worker of mine is pretty good friends with Boomer Grigsby. If you want to do an exclusive R&R Q&A with him, we could probably do it.

No. 3: One of the toughest things in life is finding any mention of Cecil Collins in the McNeese record books.