How far back do I go with this one? Do I go back to being an upstate New York kid, in love with everything Boston? To being eight, and the sensory overload of my first game at Fenway? Riding home from that game, all I could remember – like the image inside your eyelids after staring at something way too brilliant – was a color I had never seen before. The overwhelming Fenway green. Kind of evergreen, and seafoam, and chalky and grey and bright. It was not a part of the Red Sox color scheme. It was everywhere. It was perfect.

To the late 80s and early 90s, making my own terrible baseball cards and creating fake NFL teams (the Oakland Tremors, anyone?) so I could have an excuse to draw logos and uniforms for them. (In my defense, there was no team in Oakland then, and nobody in any sport I knew about was doing black and green – not yet, anyway.)

Maybe a little later, to the 1994 World Cup that I watched at back-yard barbecues. The one that made Americans like me kind of, sort of, perk up and watch for a second. Where we saw a carnival of color and the way an international soccer crowd moves and sounds – it was all different than what we were used to.  Where we started to understand that yellow, blue and green (for instance) could signify something the way we thought only red, white and blue could.