Everything I think is true about my past is apparently wrong

Not long ago, I found a plastic bin in our storage room filled with memorabilia from my high school and college years.

When this happens and you're in your mid-40s, you may as well block off the next couple of hours on your calendar, because you're going to have a grand old time rummaging through that bin and reliving what apparently passes for your glory years.

And it was fun. Among the items I came across was a spiral-bound booklet recapping my senior football season in the fall of 1987. I read through almost the entire thing.

Football was a funny thing for me. I was the only person I knew who played football mostly to stay in shape for track, which was my main sport. For most other guys, sports like track were used to stay in shape for football.

I was a running back, and a career back-up at that. This was partly because I had some excellent athletes playing ahead of me in Scott Martin (tailback) and Ron Szinte (fullback). I was faster than both of them, but they were both stronger than me and had much better football sense.

We also had a very good team overall, going 8-2 my senior year and losing to Youngstown Cardinal Mooney, the eventual Division III Ohio state champions, in our one and only playoff game.

As a result, I carried the ball on the varsity level fewer than 30 times through four seasons. I managed to score four touchdowns during that time, and I somehow averaged more than 10 yards a carry my senior year, but I was never much more than a third option when it came to running the ball in our Wing-T offense.

Which was actually fine with me. Like I said, football was there to keep me in shape in the months before indoor track started. And what I mostly liked about it was the contact and daily routine of our practices.

Anyway, as I read through that old booklet and relived those 11 games from my senior year, I realized that over time I have completely fabricated many memories about them.

Final scores I have in my head were wrong. Carries I thought I had were nowhere to be found in the stats. And details I was sure would never leave my brain were almost as inaccurate as they could be.

This leads me to believe that at some point when we reach our 20s, we create a narrative of our childhoods and our high school experiences that we take as gospel truth. And many times it is.

But in some cases, we either believe what we want to be true, or else we inadvertently change up the story in our heads and after awhile it becomes our own personal version of reality.

I can't tell you whether this is good or bad. Only that it is.

I'd like to think that my overall impression of high school is accurate. As I remember it, I had a ball. I have no desire to repeat that time of my life, really, but all in all, it was a fun time for me.

So now I'm scared to death that somehow these happy memories are going to get blown up the way my supposedly crystal-clear football memories were rocked by reality nearly 30 years after the fact.

Do me a favor: If I served time in prison or something when I was in high school and I've simply blocked it out, please don't tell me. I'm perfectly fine living in this Bubble of Happiness I've created for myself.