There are times my wife meets people who recognize my name and know what I do for a living, and invariably the first question posed is this:

“You must love sports, too, right?”

This weekend marks 34 years since I sidled up to her in the newsroom at the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville, Ark. I was the paper’s sports editor. She was a rookie general assignment reporter. I was drawn by the fetching purple dress.

And I had a killer, can’t-miss opening line: