Anniversaries are usually a good thing.

Me and sugar-mama have been married for like eight years. Ish. No, I’m sure it’s eight years because it was after my first full season working basketball which was 2001-02. We were in Kansas City for the league tournament and when I came home, that next week I booked our tickets for our wedding trip to Las Vegas. And I was joking that we should have went that weekend since I didn’t have any work to do.

See, I relate everything in my life to sports in some way or another, even the important things like getting married. She loves me for my quirks like that, or at least she’s cool enough to let me think so.

And for things like knowing when our first official date was. That would be Feb. 7, 1998. That was a Saturday.

How do I know this?

Because that was supposed to be the baseball team’s season opener for my first season at East Carolina. But there was rain and we got pushed back to Monday, so instead of sitting on a bus half the day and sitting at a ballpark the other half, I spent that Saturday with sugar-mama, who back then was student-mama.

Then on Monday, we went to Duke and lost 3-2 because a freshman made a shitty base-running error in the top of the seventh and ran us out of the inning. I remember this too because that day was the only time in 14 years working in college athletics that the bus actually left without me after the game. Coach was pissed, and as I went to Cameron Indoor Stadium to get a box score printed out–in other words, just doing my job–they had loaded the bus and were already turned off 15-501, headed up the main highway before our centerfielder reminded coach, “Didn’t we come with an SID?”

This is my life. And it’s getting old.

That’s the only time I’m not so big on anniversaries is when they make me feel older. I won’t say they make me feel old in general, because my ornery attitude, as sugar-mama says, and big mouth tend to do just enough to make me feel young. But some anniversaries are starting to make me grimace.

Take the one today. It has been 25 years since Back to the Future debuted on the big screens. That’s amazing.

There is no way that I would have ever thought it’s been 25 years already. I still remember seeing the movie in the theater. It was one of the first movies I ever went to with a girl (sorry sugar-mama). And it was one of the coolest movies of the time, right up there with Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Red Dawn and Terminator.

Twenty-five years. There’s no way that feels that long ago. What the hell else was going on 25 years ago?

  • Sweetness was roaming the backfield for Da Bears during Da Super Bowl Season. There are few players who I would go out of my way to want to be around. There are even fewer who I would actually stoop to get an autograph. Sweetness would be the only person, if he were here today, who I would become a puddle of goo around. Remembering him, and what he did and how he was, that doesn’t feel like 25 years ago.
  • Ryno was young and hitting it big. The Cubs snapped the playoff-less streak a year before and it was any time soon that they were going to be back in the World Series. He didn’t have to worry about getting snubbed by his own organization. This one right here may make me feel both 23 and 103 when I’m 58.
  • MJ was fresh out of college. He didn’t have any muscle yet, but he had springs on the end of pogo sticks on the end of rubber bumper legs. Man he could jump out of the old Stadium. The greatness was still to come, but you could see there was something there, something that made him special. The first couple seasons you didn’t know he’d be what he was (you know what I mean), but when it turned, it was like a wave of fun for years, which only felt like days. Like yesterday, actually.
  • My greatest personal sports gaffe was about to occur during this same year. It was almost two years before I could drive a car, four years before the Berlin Wall came down. But I had reached my pinnacle. Everyone around school knew me because of one snap in a freshman football practice. You ever see Tin Cup? You remember why he was called Tin Cup? Translate that over to a couple so-called buddies allowing me to go in to block a field goal uncontested, and you have my immortal football moment.

That’s how long ago 25 years was. So long ago that I can actually laugh at that memory and talk about it openly, that moment of childish pranks that led to pain and swelling for several weeks.

But hey, by comparison it’s not that long ago. I mean, the 20th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s first-ever concert was last Friday, and that doesn’t seem that far in the past, does it?

Fuck, I’m old.