I’m back. I know you’ve missed me like your drunk uncle who always chimes in at the most inappropriate moments. The one who wants to have a serious talk about your parents’ divorce at your wedding, with wheezing whiskey-flavored saliva in your face the entire speech.

I’d like to digress from my meaningless sports banter once brought to you in my “Freezing My Royal Rastafarian Na-Na’s Off” column and give you something else.

Something, with luck, you might even be interested in.

I’m not talking about the interest you have in an in-flight magazine that you’re forced to read out of boredom.

I bring to you a column about true stories that took place here on Loyola’s campus.

Trivia time: Did you know boxing was once an NCAA sport?

If that doesn’t blow the lid off your open container of beer, how about this: Loyola used to have one of the best boxing teams in the country.

Did you even know Loyola had sports teams?

I’ll give you the stories of great upsets. Stories about fighting racism through basketball.

Did you know the likes of Bill Russell and Pete Maravich once played on Loyola’s campus?

How about Loyola’s baseball team, which went on to represent Team USA in El Salvador?

Ever wonder about those shirts that say “Loyola football undefeated since 1939?” I’ll tell you why.

Not impressed yet? How about a Loyola man winning a gold medal?

The Associated Press called him “the greatest welterweight in the history of the South.”

Jack Dempsey called him a sure thing.

But to workers at a local auditorium, they knew Eddie Flynn as a janitor. His brother, Denis, worked an orange-drink stand. Together they made up the “Fighting Flynns” – a deadly combination of jabs that hooked New Orleans in wonder in the early 1930s.

T.K.O. That’s to say if boxing terms were applied to my writing, I win, I just knocked-you-out.

In my last column nine months ago I left you with this –

“I often feel like I was born in the wrong era, that I came to Loyola decades too late. Surely it was a different time. It was a time when players wore jerseys of wool and football players ran fearlessly without helmets. It was a time when we rubbed elbows with the best of the country and on the Olympic stage with the best in the world.”

A teaser, I know.

OK, so I’ll give you what could be the script for the next Disney sports drama – the next Kevin Costner baseball movie. (Hollywood execs, no worries, I don’t belong to the Writers Guild of America. Instead I’m a poor college student that would work to upgrade from Ramen Noodles.)

So sit back this semester, read with caution and take an aspirin for that K.O.

And if anything, what you read will be better than airplane emergency procedures.