This past week, the Minot State University volleyball team defeated Dickinson State in volleyball. The match was a milestone.
It marked the first time the Beavers had topped the perennial powerhouse Blue Hawks in 14 years. That's an eternity in college athletics where classes come and go in no more than five years.
It was a great win for the program and a good day for the Beavers players as well as head coach Johnna Lewis. The win moved the Beavers to 4-3 in the DAC, good for sole possession of third place entering the second half of the conference season.
While it isn't quite long enough to say something like the team wasn't born yet or that their parents were involved with the last win, it is long enough to think most of the current Beavers weren't exactly thinking about college volleyball. Most of the team would have been in elementary school and even maybe preschool. Their thoughts were more like, "Wow, kindergarten is way harder than preschool," or if they were really up on pop culture it might have been "That poor Kurt Cobain died way too early," or even "I wonder if O.J. did it."
All right, we are still wondering about the last one.
But 14 years removed is long enough to make me reminisce about good old 1994.
What else was happening in the world when the Beavers last topped their biggest rival? A quick trip down memory lane thanks to the fine folks at Wikipedia.org should help jog your memory.
On top of Cobain's death, the world lost one of its truly funny people when actor John Candy died of a heart attack. Some other notable deaths were actors Burt Lancaster and Telly Savalas, serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, the former First Lady.
Actress Dakota Fanning was brought into this world as was singer-songwriter Nat Wolff of Nickelodeon's The Naked Brothers Band fame (ask your kids, they probably know who he is.)
Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Philadelphia was the No. 1 pop song in the U.S. and Limp Bizkit, Garbage, Muse, and the Spice Girls all formed bands (or whatever you call the Spice Girls).
While it was quite few years ago, research shows that some things don't change either.
The biggest financial story of 1994 seems a little familiar. In a planned exchange rate correction of the Mexican Peso, a fallout ensued that sent the Mexican market tumbling. Yep, you guessed it, the U.S. stepped in with a $50 billion bailout.
In the world of sports, the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl and there was no World Series because a bunch of greedy players and greedy owners couldn't decide who in fact was the greediest of them all so they cancelled the season.
Last, in maybe the saddest and most ridiculous sports story I have heard, Colombian soccer star Andres Escobar was shot to death in Bogata for what many believed was in retaliation for scoring an "own goal" in the 1994 FIFA World Cup. As he was trying to defend a crossing pass, Escobar, a defender, knocked in the goal and Columbia lost to the United States 2-1, eliminating them for the tournament.
By the way, I was in my second freshman year at the University of North Dakota, trying to figure out what the heck to study but spending most of my time trying to woo my eventual wife Nichole.
Funny, nothing I was doing that year made it to Wikipedia.
A lot happened that year and a lot has happened since then. Just for the record, the Blue Hawks have a chance to break MSU's current one-game streak dating all the way back to Oct. 8.
On that day, Romanian cell biologist George Emil Palade died you get the picture.
(Michael Linnell is the sports editor for The Minot Daily News. He can be reached by e-mail at mlinnell@minotdailynews.com)