When people imagine themselves traveling through time, they don’t think about the smells. Why would they? Why ruin what should be a fun thought exercise with that detail?
When the national media and fossils over 40 like me reminisce about the Knicks/Pacers rivalry through the 1990s, a lot of the time a lot of the fossil record only exists in trace amounts. The headlines endure: “Reggie Miller in an animated discussion with Spike Lee”; “Johnson is fouled — and hit!” The nostalgia, too, in a folk sense. But nobody warns you about the pain, what it feels like when the stakes are this high.