The cruelest irony of today, an age where everyone can know anything, and anyone can know everything, provided they have the appetite and aptitude to seek out some initial iota of fact beyond the comfort of empty rhetoric, is how acutely the ubiquity of information has caused many of us (roughly just under half if the last election is any indication) to beat a hasty retreat to the comfort of obliviousness. In today’s non-stop onslaught of stimuli, it is hard to truly recall a time when you not only didn’t know everything you wanted to, but in many cases you flat out couldn’t.

It was through this haze of hungry unawareness, of patient, situational voracity – a desire to consume information that I couldn’t be certain existed – that the glory of the annual Street & Smith’s College Basketball preview first tickled my childhood fancy. An example of the Printed Internet, or Printernet, as I like to call it: things in our analog youth that were windows to the world beyond the familiarity of our immediate geographical confines. Encyclopedia Britannica, The Guinness Book of World Records, National Geographic – printed matter that viscerally pushed us out into other realms, transporting us into the up-til-then unknowable ether, before the liberating power of the internet actually brought the world to us on a truly on demand basis.

For us, these windows always opened on Christmas morning, themselves the culmination of months of breathless anticipation. Large format color magazines which were a reliable stocking stuffer for Mum/Santa, allowing us to really sink our teeth into a basketball season that had started in earnest a couple of weeks prior, and providing a visual reference point for the styles and stars of the new season.

In a flurry of photography of heretofore unknown college basketball players, wearing unfamiliar, often funny uniforms (looking at you, Evansville), and, perhaps most importantly, tantalizingly rare sneakers, Street & Smiths was like the Bible for kids like my brother and me.  It was a truly revered, mind-boggling tome, constantly referenced but somehow never read in full. So rich with new information that even years after their publishing date, new nuggets of wisdom are ripe for the unearthing with each subsequent perusal – and we tore into them with a fervor and energy suited to the most zealous of zealots.

It wasn’t until later, while doing business as a twenty-something with the publisher for their equally renowned Sports Business Journal, that I realized these annuals were actually published in the late summer. Which makes sense given that they were actually meant to serve as a season preview for more grown-up fans who may have, I don’t know, wanted to place a wager or two on the upcoming season perhaps? Funny, innocence.

For the athletics (and athletics aesthetics) obsessed among us, there was nothing like them in terms of content: deeply-researched and passionately reported outlooks for every conference, and every team in the country. Thorough snapshots of the national Junior College (JuCo) scene, inevitably highlighting renowned epicenter of academic endeavor: San Jacinto (Truck Driving) College.

Full page color action shots of national collegiate heroes, as well as the many smaller market stars that went otherwise unseen in the Big East-obsessed region of my youth: Wyoming’s hulking 20 & 10 machine Fennis Dembo, Temple’s Mark Macon exponentially if unintentionally upping his street cred in Boston by rocking maroon on white adidas Forums, the competing glory of the blaze orange Converse Weapons and the GOAT mullet of Florida Gator Dwayne Schintzius, knee-pad and goggle-clad Erkel acolyte Elliot Perry of then Memphis State. The Ivy League sections – never quite exciting enough for a color photo, that is until the arrival of Jerome Allen at Penn. Images all so seared into my hippocampus that I am sure that, should my life ever flash before my eyes, a pair of Hoya Terminators has a solid shot at being the last thing I see.

Of course, given the amount of time I obsessed over those very sneakers, and Ralph Dalton’s impossibly high hi-top versions in particular, among others, there’s a good chance that would have been the case even without Street & Smith’s. But as a dude who has spent the lion’s share of his 40 years on Earth with his eyes fixed downward, aggressively scoping out the shoe games of any and everyone nearby, the earliest memories I have of this very activity harken back to those Christmas days, when despite the inevitable bounty of my other gifts, this annual tribute to collegiate hoop superstars and the rainbow that was Team Colorway footwear SKUs held my attention far more rapt than any other gift. Before the days of Eastbay, this was as close as it got to sneaker porn. And I remember those moments like they were yesterday.

So, perhaps not surprisingly, the feeling is familiar nowadays when cracking open these now decidedly more delicate maps of my memories: pages yellowed from time, the many pictures I recognize and remember, the relatively few that I don’t. The utterly incongruous ads for cigarettes and booze, and their delightfully odd syntax and art direction. The sections of editorial I ignored almost entirely in my youth yet I dig most heavily into today (back issues readily and joyously available via eBay), namely the Prep sections highlighting the year’s best HS seniors and underclassmen-to-be: names immaterial to me at the time only to become household and legendary mere years later. I like to think that if I ever begin to suffer the effects of dementia, or CTE from my many concussions, leafing through these issues will jog the neuro-pathways back to life in a manner to how they do today.

Perhaps it was their scarcity – annual publications gracing us but once a year, as opposed to the weekly and monthly arrivals of other more familiar works like SI, SPORT, and Inside Sports. Perhaps it was the inclusion of faces you didn’t see terribly frequently in those other mags, against the backdrop of gyms that may as well have been in Istanbul. Or Mars. Perhaps it was just the timing of their arrival, and connecting this visual overload with the already joyous annual rites of passage that were Christmas mornings. Perhaps it was the fact that these publications exalted the very young men my brother, and as a result, I, so feverishly admired – big time college basketball players – in a dedicated, exclusive, almost Godly manner. And our subsequent ability to quote them, chapter and verse.

Perhaps it was all of that. Or maybe, really, it was just the shoes…money, it’s gotta be the shoes.