Once was the time University of Tennessee athletics was synonymous with greatness on almost every front, nearly shaming the entire Southeastern Conference into caring about more than football.
Back in the 1970s, for instance, there were national championships in track and field and swimming. Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King famously graced the cover of Sports Illustrated that same decade. Some lefty pitcher from Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe named Rick Honeycutt starred on the baseball team. Pat Head Summitt was about to take over women's college basketball. The 1970 football team shut out Alabama 24-0.
Cut to the 1990s and that same football program not only grabbed a national championship but won 45 games between 1995 and 1998.
That same decade the baseball team reached the World Series for the first time in more than 40 years. The Lady Vols basketball team tacked on three national championships. It was as if everything on Rocky Top was working like Clockwork Orange.
And if the early 2000s pretty much continued that trend as the Lady Vols added national titles, the baseball team reached two more World Series and the men's basketball team briefly ascended to No. 1 under former coach Bruce Pearl, it also seemed as if everything came crashing to earth by 2011.
Summitt was forced to retire due to early onset dementia. Pearl was forced out due to NCAA violations. Football coach Derek Dooley oversaw the first loss to Kentucky since 1984. It was as if the poster child for a well-rounded athletic department went from Rocky Top to rock bottom quicker than the late, great John Ward could shout "Give him SIX."
But to look at UT's top-ranked baseball program, its SEC champion women's swimming and diving squad - the UT men tied for second - its highly ranked men's and women's basketball teams that each won a game in their respective NCAA Tournaments, and a football team many believe can grab 10 victories (at least) this year under second-year coach Josh Heupel is to believe this current edition of the Big Orange across all sports just might do its distant predecessors proud.
And should that happen, second-year athletic director Danny White - one of the brightest young minds in the business at the tender age of 42 - just might prove to be the second or third coming of past UT AD greats Bob Woodruff and Doug Dickey.
To be fair, White's only notable hire to date among the sports doing the best is Heupel, though most would also argue that if you really get that right, the rest can far more easily fall into place.
Yet should Heupel produce the kind of excitement in Year Two that he did in Year One - when the Vols wound up 7-6 on the season and put up the kind of offense usually reserved for the Kansas City Chiefs - White will be worth every penny of the $1.8 million salary that made him the wealthiest AD in the ridiculously rich SEC.
Beyond that, and whether White deserves much credit for this or not, there's a kind of championship culture forming in Knoxville, an attitude among the athletes that the Big Orange program is a special one in all sports, much as it was when nobody throughout the South much cared about being excellent in all sports save the Vols.
For proof, merely listen to Vols second baseman Jorel Ortega after UT bounced back from a Friday loss to Alabama to take the remaining two games of the series.
"We trust each other," he told the Knoxville News. "In any situation you throw at us, we are not really worried. We know what we are capable of doing. We got the job done."
Come Tuesday evening between 5:30 and 7:30 inside Chattanooga Whiskey Hall at 890 Riverfront Parkway, the Big Orange Nation is expected to be able to tell White what a great job he's done and is doing when the Big Orange Caravan rolls into town.
If nothing else, that job would seem to underscore what Auburn AD Allen Greene, a close friend and former colleague of White's, said after UT hired him.
"Danny is someone who is very passionate about this industry," Greene told the Tennessean. "He's passionate about student-athletes. He's passionate about winning. I've got to believe Tennessee is on the right track with his hire."
The right track back to the good ol' days.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.