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This is a guest submission from Mike Bernos, a writer, essayist and public relations professional. Though it is inspired by true events, it is a work of fiction.

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“Moonlight floods the sky from horizon to horizon; How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.” —  Rumi  

I remembered thinking about a lot of things, “working on mysteries without any clues” as the song goes. But that would change, including the arc of my life, one Friday morning in late July. I arrived at the club just after 6 a.m., which even at that hour the humidity drew sweat like a sauna. I waited only 30 minutes before being assigned a foursome and in particular the bag of the Irishman, Cullen. A wiry man in his late forties with slightly hunched-over shoulders, he kept no close friends, and members regarded him as an enigma since joining the club three years earlier. No one knew where he came from; rumor had it that he had been run out of his hometown in Ireland for embezzling a small fortune.

It had been 21 years since I sat on this bench perched on a levee at Audubon Park overlooking the nearly mile-wide Mississippi River. I lived on Magazine Street during that long-ago summer of 1970, not far from the park and its golf course where I worked as a caddy. During those days, the river’s fog seemed to settle around my head as I drifted, nearly lost, after the loss of my mother one month short of my 12th birthday. Following her death my father went absent, too, hanging out more often than usual in the backroom gambling dens and 24-hour bars of New Orleans. 

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There are a lot of blues in this world, even in the literal sense.

There’s the soft blue of a clear morning sky or the rich blues of the deep ocean. The navy blues that make up the marks of so many sports teams, as well as the paler blues prevalent in spring flowers.

On July 29, 2010, a different shade of blue flowed through Trail Creek in Athens. 

It was bright. It was harsh.

This blue contrasted against the greenery of summer, lush leaves filling out the plentiful trees that lined the waters. Gone was the murky, muddy mixture that punctuates creeks and rivers throughout the South. In its place was a near-neon blue snaking its way through a network of tributaries and leaving streaks of artificial color in its wake.

For the past few weeks, we’ve shared a Thursday essay or story with our full email list that we intend to provide exclusively to our Patreon subscribers. Last week was the time we’ll be sharing that content with our full list, transitioning it solely to our BTT Backers starting this Thursday. In that spirit, we did want to share this brief article that was featured last week for everyone to see what we typically include in this special newsletter for our supporters. 

Supporting BTT through Patreon is important because, yes, it shows us you appreciate the stories we’re trying to tell, but also because that money goes toward our writer’s fund so we can properly and justly compensate our guest contributors for their time, effort and work. As such, if you aren’t already, we’re asking you to consider pledging just $5 a month at our Patreon site so we can build up a healthy, recurring base of funds to support our contributors, and you can keep getting unique, interesting stories through our Thursday newsletter.

Seeing the Braves in first place heading into the final 10 days of the regular season — yes, we’re there already — inevitably gets me thinking about Octobers past. 

And when it comes to the Braves, one October memory inevitably stands out above the rest: Sid Bream rounding third, torso bending forward in an I-think-I-can chug, willing himself down the baseline before sliding across the plate as Mike LaValliere lunges for the tag.

Skip Caray: “He is … SAFE! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! Braves win! … Braves — WIN!”

If you look closely at video or still photos of that spellbinding sequence that ended Game 7 of the 1992 National League Championship Series, you can see that the right leg of Bream’s uniform pants is bulkier than the left, an unnatural framework visible around the knee.

At some point on Kirby Smart’s walk back to the locker room after Georgia’s 65-7 dismantling of TCU in the 2023 College Football Playoff National Championship game, he lifted three fingers to the sky.

The gesture didn’t make live television – the Bulldogs’ head coach was smart enough to do it off camera – but it was meant to send a message to the Bulldog fans in attendance – the Dawgs aren’t done.

Before the 2021 season, Georgia fans asked themselves when the 41-year drought would end. Two years – and two CFP National Championships – later, those who wear red and black ask a tougher question: Could they possibly capture another?

This is Part Two of our look back at the history of NewsChannel 32, a television station that provided in-depth coverage of local news and sports for Northeast Georgia. In Part One, we took a look at the formation of the station and the work of its news department, and you can read it here.

There really isn’t any other way to put it, but if you didn’t live through it, you don’t really get it.

You see, there once was a time where you couldn’t just flip on the TV and watch whatever game you wanted to watch.

This was especially true for the NFL.

Before the days of Sunday Ticket or RedZone — where the NFL finally realized it could make even more money by simply making you pay to watch its weekly games — folks were stuck with whatever it was the local networks gave them. If the Atlanta Falcons were blacked out, hello Dallas vs. Cleveland. If you really wanted to check in on that Miami-Washington contest, just hold your breath and hope they break into coverage to show you a quick snippet.

Yes, this is hard to comprehend in today’s media landscape where nearly every professional league has some sort of on-demand package to watch games, meaning a Seattle Seahawks fan in Memphis, Tennessee can tune in every Sunday to watch Russell Wilson scramble to and fro.

In the 1990s, we all were at the mercy of the prevailing media rules of the market. And that helped make WNEG a prized asset for cable providers beyond the Atlanta market.