Before we start, a moment of remembrance.

The day was Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. I was sitting in my fifth-grade classroom at Dominican Academy in Plainville, day-dreaming the hours away about the upcoming weekend, when the phone rang across the hall in the principal's office.

Dominican Academy was a small school -- eight classrooms for eight elementary grades -- and my class was taught by the principal, Sister Mary Eugene, who had designated the class "validictorian," Joanne Hastings, to be the official phone answerer when class was in session.

So, Joanne dutifully sprinted out of the room to answer the phone. For the rest of us, class continued -- until she ran back into the room in tears, shouting four words that one never believes he or she will hear in his or her lifetime.

"The president's been shot!"

Immediately, Sister Mary Eugene turned on the black-and-white television at the front of the classroom, and for the next two hours, we sat with tear-filled eyes as the story of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas unfolded before us.

I'm not sure how many of my classmates understood the importance of what was happening before us. Indeed, I drew the ire of Sister Mary Eugene because I was focused more upon watching Walter Cronkite tell us the news from Dallas, and trying to understand it, than I was upon saying the rosary in a futile effort to ask God to spare the life of the first Catholic President of the United States.

As years passed, I've come to have a more adult understanding of the events of that day, and the effect it had upon American society over the following generations. But even as a 9-year-old boy, I had been aware of the youthful and dynamic direction that America had taken upon the election of the young senator from Massachusetts, and I knew even then that our lives would never be the same.

A few years ago, I finally visited Dealey Plaza in Dallas to get a feel for the site that I could see in 1963 only through a series of flickering black-and-white images on a television set. It gave me a greater sense of understanding, and perhaps closure, to a moment that will live on forever in my memory.

Now, on to the football.