The sun had set, and even twilight was fading. There, on the edge of Beautiful Eagle Creek, having finished the last practice before departing for Pocatello, Idaho and a NCAA Division 1-AA championship matchup with Furman was Eagles head coach Erk Russell.

And me. Erk’s post-practice talks were almost always audible for the fans and sideline mafia – the group of fans and boosters so dedicated to Georgia Southern football they took attendance among themselves at practices and if they spotted somebody they didn’t recognize on the sidelines, they were on him like bouncers at a nightclub.

This day, Erk pulled the team out of earshot. The huddle broke, and the team jogged and walked back down the Fair Road sidewalk to the lockers at Hanner Fieldhouse.

I was still in school at Southern, a couple of quarters away from graduating. I was working for the Statesboro Herald. I was barely 22 years old. Had never been inside a journalism classroom – still haven’t – and had the Eagles football beat for the local paper.

I had a standing reservation with Erk every Friday to discuss that week’s opponent. Once, I missed that time. I never missed it again.

Erk could take a game against the worst of the worst and make you think the Eagles had no chance to win. I’d leave his office and an hour later think to myself, he’s done it again. There’s no way that team is beating this Georgia Southern team. I was right a lot that year.

There were no palatial coaches’ offices at Georgia Southern then. All the head coaches had offices down a hallway at the bottom of Hanner Fieldhouse. It was known as “The Roost.” There was an ever-present pall of smoke along the ceiling. It was the result of Erk’s cigars from his office, and the smoke rolling out of the chain-smoking Frank Kerns’ head basketball coach’s office.

I knew it then, a little, but now, it’s apparent how lucky I was – I covered Georgia Southern’s big three sports and got to soak up knowledge, one-liners and new combinations of profanity from Erk Russell, Frank Kerns and Jack Stallings. All three incredibly respected in their fields and all three incredibly knowledgeable about their individual sports.

That week of the Furman game, there were a number of rumors around Erk. Word was starting to get floated out he was thinking about retirement.

There also was talk Georgia wanted him to succeed the retiring Vince Dooley. Erk had been Dooley’s defensive coordinator, and a folk hero to Georgia fans, on the Bulldogs’ 1980 national championship team, before he took a leap of faith and took over a Georgia Southern program that hadn’t played in 40 years and had to run across the street to a K-Mart to get a football for the introductory press conference.

Rumors of a jet with a big “G” on its tail at the Pocatello airport abounded.

The talk was Erk was starting to think he had nothing left to accomplish.

So in that December darkness, after my last question to Erk and his last answer, I looked and said, “Coach, you forgot to have the seniors salute the creek.”

For a reborn program still really in its infancy, there were some traditions already imbued. One was having the seniors salute Eagle Creek – a drainage ditch, in reality, that ran alongside the practice fields, but that Erk dubbed Beautiful Eagle Creek – after their last practice.

Yet the regimen slipped Erk’s mind. He heeded my warning, for a split second. I could tell he was thinking about yelling and bringing them back. But he changed his mind. “Nah,” he said. “Never mind.”

That year, whenever I asked the players what it was like playing for Erk, it was like a needle getting dragged across a record. Everything stopped. The look on their face changed. They looked upward, and even the tone of their voices was different. They would answer as if they were talking about their favorite grandfather.

Whatever it was, and I still never asked those if the rumors and speculation affected them, as Furman won that game.

A few weeks later, I got the Eagles 1989 schedule. I started calling all my friends. This team, I said, is going 15-0. They will absolutely stomp people. They did.

The rules of the College Football Hall of Fame are such that Erk isn’t eligible for consideration. Didn’t coach long enough, didn’t amass enough wins. I guess three national championships and four national championship games in five years isn’t enough, either.

With the bulk of the 1988 team, including our own Raymond Gross at quarterback and most of the offensive line and defense returning, the Eagles were set for great things. Southern also won the bid to host the national championship, starting that year.

So on a cold December Saturday, Mike Dowis’ game-winning field goal punched its way through the freezing air and Kevin Whitley got the game-clinching interception. Raymond took a knee and ran out the clock, and Erk went out on his players’ shoulders, with a championship trophy, doing something that had not been done that century in going 15-0.

Turns out he had something left to accomplish after all. He went out a winner. Because he was one, right to the core.