Might the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory—a psychohistorical supposition that describes recurring cycles—apply here? The return of the University of Missouri football team to the Gator Bowl during the recent holidays, though obviously a minor occurrence among life’s circumstances, nevertheless was a vivid ghost-of-Christmastime-past appearance for this old Mizzou alum.

In December of 1968, my senior year, I was one of two football beat reporters for our Journalism School’s Columbia Missourian daily newspaper. (Remember newspapers?) That fall, classmate Joe Rhein and I covered the footballers’ exploits in what—believe it or not—was our scholarly duty, our semester’s assignment for a reporting class. Which made the so-called “Missouri Method” of J-School—learning by doing—about as much fun as one can have without laughing. (Though we certainly had some yukks along the way.)

Rhein and I alternated the driving chores to away games in Kentucky, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, mixed in with witnessing five home games. And when the gridders had the good fortune of being invited to a high-visibility post-season event in Jacksonville. Fla., Rhein and I were afforded special scholarships (valued at a whopping $100 apiece) to fly to the Sunshine State and chronicle the team’s preparation and bowl participation.

Over the years—many, many years—I continued attempting to commit sports journalism for Long Island’s Newsday, assigned to Super Bowls, soccer World Cups, Olympic Games, Triple Crown races, tennis Grand Slams, NBA playoffs, March Madness, World Series, Stanley Cup playoffs, on and on—during which I was introduced to various cultures, fascinating people and exotic locales. Still, that the ’68 Gator Bowl was an early step into the Big Time.

So to notice, more than a generation later, that the Mizzou lads were returning to that scene from 57 years ago conjured the old Mark Twain quote: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Almost everything about this sort of do-over was different. In 1968, the Gator was a big deal, one of only 10 major college bowl games. This winter, there were 41. That ’68 game was played in the original Gator Bowl stadium, demolished in 1994 after 48 years. But the Gator Bowl game, now burdened with one of those sponsored titles so common in sport’s relentless money grab, still is played on the same site, in what is now the NFL Jacksonville Jaguars’ palace, and has retained the west upper deck and ramping system from the original infrastructure.

The old joint, the one I attended in ’68 and again on assignment for Newsday to cover the 1980 Gator Bowl—because it featured that season’s Heisman Trophy winner George Rogers of South Carolina—had been home to the eponymous bowl game since 1946. That included the one in 1955 that was the first nationally televised bowl game.

The Beatles, during their first American tour in 1964, had played the Gator Bowl, though only after the Fab Four demanded that concert organizers nixed plans for a segregated audience. The Gator Bowl stadium also was host to the annual Florida-Georgia game, in which a football rivalry broke out amid the repeatedly raucous tailgating that caused the event to be known as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”

All of this history is just a reminder of how old I am. Yet that theory devised by William Strauss—author, playwright, theater director, lecturer—and Neil Howe—author, consultant, senior associate at the Center for Stategic and International Studies’ Global Aging Initiative—asserts that stuff that happened long ago comes back. Major crises and societal reconstruction, things like revolution and wars.

Sure enough, 1968 was a year of global upheaval, the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, widespread anti-war and civil rights protests, violent clashes at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

And here, as 2025 slipped into 2026, we have conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, political unrest regarding migration and the Trump administration’s autocratic, bullying leanings, what feels like unremitting gun violence, uncertainly regarding AI and robotics, struggles with climate disasters.

So Missouri was back in the Gator Bowl on Dec. 27, playing (and losing to) the University of Virginia, this time while I was thousands of miles away at my daughter’s place in London, and the 1968 date with Alabama came to mind:

First day in Florida, there in late December, we saw Santas roaming around in shorts, not what blow-ins from the Midwest expected. It was 70 degrees. Rhein and I waded in the ocean and did our duty reporting on all happenings related to the team’s game preparation, including the fact that—during the team’s leisure time at the beach, assistant manager Stan Biggs had his right eye blackened by a stray surfboard.

There was a pre-game banquet at which Missouri coach Dan Devine told his kidding-on-the-square joke on Alabama’s enormously successful and widely venerated coach, Paul Bryant, whom everyone knew as Bear.

“One night in the winter,” Devine said, “Bear had just gotten into bed and Mary Harmon”—Bryant always called his wife by her full maiden name—“said to him, ‘God, your feet are cold.’ And Bear said to her, ‘You can call me Paul.’”

Days before the game, Devine dismissed a key offensive lineman from the team—a player he called the best blocking center he had had—for what he called “unwillingness to abide by team rules” and never further clarified the offense. (Would that happen now?)

In the game, Mizzou rolled Alabama like dice in a surprising 35-10 victory that didn’t include a single completed pass by the winning side. The academic research of Strauss and Howe aside, that statistic may never be repeated.