One night during my senior year at BC, I was having a delightful pop-culture discussion with a good friend of mine. Our talk focused on, of all movies, The Mighty Ducks, an integral movie in our respective lives, to the point where its quotability (since we knew all the lines) so outweighed its overall goodness as a film (the Adam Banks Hawk-to-Duck arc, as a foil for Gordon Bombay’s, is a little forced. How could no one from the league notice that “the lake is not the boundary anymore”?).

I asked Megan a question, which I still claim to be the finest question I’ve ever asked – not because it’s so clever on my part, but because I didn’t think it could possibly have an actual answer, and yet it did. It was abstractness made concrete: I asked her when the career trajectories of Emilio Estevez (co-star of Men at Work) and Joshua Jackson (of The Skulls) crossed paths.

I am Jack’s witty repartee.

To my shock and amusement, Megan had an answer for me. And it was phrased in the form of an episode of Dawson’s Creek.

The episode was called “Detention,” an homage to The Breakfast Club. In the show, someone mentions Emilio Estevez and Joshua Jackson’s character, Pacey, responds, “He was in those Mighty Ducks movies. I love those movies.”

Cue Josh; boo Emilio.

The episode aired March 3, 1998.

Another such intersection is occurring this week, but I’ll choose to spot it today – December 5, 2004. It’s the first Sunday after the Jason Giambi steroid fiasco, and the first Football Sunday. I’m a diehard baseball fan, and always have been, and defended the sport against its detractors who claim that football is now America’s national pastime. There was no way to support either in a present-day argument, really, since recognizing a “pastime” involves looking backward, in which case baseball was it, hands down.

But perhaps it no longer is, or shortly won’t be. And I hate to say it, but I’m seeing it happen.