While watching baseball, this appeared in my Twitter feed:

This is how hot it will feel during the afternoon hours over the next few days… pic.twitter.com/7sNeOtyuTl

— Amelia Draper (@amelia_draper) July 23, 2016

The combination sparked a memory that simultaneously makes me very proud of young me and makes me wonder how he survived.

I was 11, and the baseball team I was playing on that summer was at the Virginia state tournament.  Temperatures the entire weekend were, if I recall correctly, roughly 1 billion degrees.

Fortunately for me, I was a bench player on that team, meaning I got to spend a merciful amount of time inside the more comfortable shade of the dugout.  I also had a lot of downtime with not many people around.

And there was a cooler.  It was a pretty fancy one with a square panel you could open to get something without having to open the entire lid and let out the cold.  Young me saw this as a perfectly sized hole to put my head inside.

The experiment started out swimmingly.  I took off my hat, flipped open the panel and managed to suck in my ears just enough to get the bulk of my head into the land of the cool.  I relished in the frigid air for a few moments before deciding I better get back out before the inning ended.

But there was a major problem.  The same ears that allowed my head to slide in just fine suddenly became difficult and decided to turn into flaps meant to trap me inside the cooler forever.  Sixth grade was going to be really awkward.

Somehow after a few moments of panic that extended to the possibility of ripping both ears off, I managed to make it out.  Even more miraculously, not a single person saw what happened.  Or, at least, nobody ever said anything.  I hope for their sake they did get to witness such a great moment in history.

This goofball lived to see another year of baseball: