"Who does that?"

It came back to him, dimly. A random LSU fan. Some hazy memory that he, Brian Downing, had for God knows what reason presented his ball sack to the faceless many. A jumbled-up din of laughter and cheers and chants of "Roll Tide."

This is bad, he thought.

For a while, the friends ragged him, but before long they were asleep. Downing was in disbelief. He spent much of the way home playing the what-if game, trying to think through the various consequences that might come from putting his balls on another man's face. By the time he pulled into his driveway, though, he'd convinced himself that, yes, what had happened was stupid, monumentally stupid. But worse things happen on Bourbon Street every night, don't they? He went inside. He kissed his wife and baby. Within a day or so, Brian Downing stopped worrying about the incident altogether.

In the not-too-distant past -- before the ubiquity of camera phones, before social media, before people ate up their days watching videos on the Internet -- that's surely where this story would have ended.

Read More | "Last Time They Met" | Mark Winegardner | ?ESPN The Magazine | ?@ErwinMontgomery