By PATRICK REUSSE, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Kentucky and Utah were playing for the NCAA men's basketball title in the Alamodome on March 30, 1998. This was Tubby Smith's first season at Kentucky and the culmination of what had been nine years of good work for Rick Majerus at Utah.

The Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans played a game of hellacious drama on Jan. 24, 2010. The Saints survived 31-28 in overtime to claim the NFC Championship.

The Minnesota Vikings will make the official start to a second half-century of existence on Sept. 11, when they play the Chargers in San Diego. The site will be Qualcomm Stadium, a place that was around so long ago as a football/baseball facility that it formerly was named in honor of a sportswriter (Jack Murphy) rather than a corporation.

John Cooper took Arizona State to the Rose Bowl and defeated Michigan in January 1987. Ohio State enjoys it so much when Michigan loses in football that, a year later, Cooper was hired to replace Earle Bruce as the Buckeyes coach.

Cooper lasted 13 years in Columbus, even though he had two major flaws: He couldn't win bowl games (3-8) and he couldn't beat Michigan (2-10-1).

The media covering the Masters still was located in the Quonset hut left over from World War II. There was a small, oblong interview room and it was jammed with reporters wanting in on Seve Ballesteros' post-round Q & A.

This was the mid-1980s and you could not write a lead paragraph to a Seve piece without a reference to the "dashing Spaniard."

NASCAR's top series, the Winston Cup, was catching fire as a major league sport in the early 1990s. My paper wanted to join in, although we didn't have what you would call a racing expert.

So, when the boss wanted a national story, I was generally the volunteer.

The Ryder Cup was a very large deal in the mid-'90s. At that time, Minnesota native Tom Lehman was among the best players in the world. This combination allowed a Minneapolis sportswriter to convince the editors it was a service to Star Tribune readers to send him to Spain to cover the 1997 matches.

Maybe it's because I've watched Al Pacino in "Scarface" and Johnny Depp in "Blow" a couple of times too many, but there's this picture that kept coming to mind on Tuesday afternoon:

Brad Childress has gone from six victories in 2006 to eight, 10 and 12 in the seasons that followed. Another two-victory increase in 2010 would be a vault more than a step, but it's not out of the question with the talent the Minnesota Vikings have this season.

The 2009 British Open was held at Turnberry. Tiger Woods missed the cut and acted as a fool in the process. The club throwing, profanities and self-pitying poses went from isolated to constant.

These antics were so far beyond what we had witnessed from Woods in the past that I wrote a column on the subject.