The two also worked out with Mike Boyle, who specializes in getting pro football hopefuls ready for the combine, an annual show players put on for the NFL scouts. Kacyvenski, Nowinski, Clare and Eitzmann all traveled to Burlington, Vt., twice a week to work out with Boyle.

"Oh, that time your car broke down, that was funny," Kacyvenski says. "What was up with that girl who stuck around with you?"

"Oh God, that girl was married, dude. I drove separately and broke down, luckily in the exit we take. They all rolled up about 30 minutes later. It was nice, the four of us pushing my car across six lanes of traffic, flagging down cars. One girl was setting a block for us with her car. Then some girl stopped out of nowhere with like nine tattoos and tried to help us fix my car, but then she was married, so we said, 'OK, see you later.' We thought she might have been hitting on us for a second."

"She was hitting on you."

"I guess she was," Nowinski says.

It was at one of the Boyle sessions that Nowinski got his nickname--Mr. Ass.

"We were with Boyle, and he's bragging about how overdeveloped his ass is," Kacyvenski accuses.

"No, that's not the story. The story is that--you always embellish the story--we were doing a stretch, and it involves your gluteus, and he said I was the least flexible, the worst he'd ever seen in his 20 years--and I told him I was overdeveloped."

"But he didn't leave it there."

"I did leave it there! Eitzmann couldn't get around me while we were squatting and said, 'My God, you have the biggest ass I've ever seen.'"

"Anyway, he's turning it his way all the time," Kacyvenski says. "He's bragging about how it's overdeveloped all the time, that it's where he gets his power."

"OK, I did say I had powers."

Other summer stories include an aborted trip to Polish Fest and the mythical trip to Taunton to meet a girl.

"We got there at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday night, and she's got three friends there, and two of them split. We're sitting there, bald and enormous, and all these dudes are hitting on our girls while we're sitting there," Nowinski says.

"But let's get to the moral of the Taunton story. We squeezed in a booth with four ex-cheerleaders from B.C., and these guys they were with told them they were leaving, and they said, 'We're staying here.'"