Let Me Tell Y’all A Story is a weekly column that’s usually not focused on sports. It’s brought to you by our partners at Chuck Owens, Alfa Insurance.

One of my favorite songs is by a guy named John R. Miller.

It’s called “Coming Down” and Tyler Childers has been known to play it live.

There’s a great version of John R. singing it at Red Rocks Amphitheatre with Childers backing him up and you can find it on YouTube should you be so inclined. My favorite version is JRM singing it beside a campfire, fyi.

The narrator of the song is longing for better times in his life.

There are touches of melancholy, sadness and hopefulness in the lyrics and delivery.

You can trace the lines of all those emotions through most of my favorite songs and singers, and you can further trace most of those threads back to Springsteen and his album, Nebraska, the inspiration for much of the music I love.

The line that first caught my ear was, “There was a good man in the making once, in the light of yesterday, been trying to remember just who he was, trying like hell to recall his name. Yeah, it used to be my name too.”

I’m 44 years old. The average life expectancy in Mississippi is 70.9 years old, so it’s fair to say that I’m in the second half of my time as a visitor on this mortal plane.

That doesn’t make me sad.

It makes me hungry.

Hungry to become the “good man in the making once” that I’ve always wanted to be.

Even in the second half of life, there is a version of myself that I want to be and I’m not him yet.

I don’t have to write down a list of resolutions for 2026.

All I have to do is look back through one of the yellow legal pads that I keep lying around.

I did that the other day, while cleaning off a desk that I’d filled with old mail and random objects.

Y’all Sports has been operating from the dining room table for these first five months. There’s a room in our home that we call the office, but it’s been mostly a catch-all space since we moved in.

I need to put up shelving for my books and clean off the desk and get the piano moved out to make it a real office, which are all taks I plan on getting done soon.

When I go to a sporting event, I take a yellow legal pad with me most times. I buy them in bulk every few years.

If it’s a big game, I’ll write down every scoring play and every detail from my sideline view.

Sitting at the desk and cleaning it, I had a pile of those often-used pads that needed to be sorted through.

I found myself flipping pages that contained my scribblings from Bogue Chitto taking on Pelahatchie last year in the MHSAA 2A basketball quarterfinals as I attempted to chronicle a classic high school hoops game.

I’ll make sure that those notes are things I don’t need anymore and if there are blank pages at the back, I’ll often tear out the used parts of the notebook and send them to the trash.

It feels like every time I find myself flipping through one of these legal pads, I’ll come across a page where I lay out the person that I want to be one day, that good man in the making that John R. sings about.

My most desired future self.

“Stop eating so much damn fast food,” reads one admonishment to myself.

“Study your Bible more than ever. Live James 1: 19-20, don’t just hear it,” is another recurring idea I’ve written in multiple legal pads.

“Read more real books and less Facebook.”

 “Breakup with gas station fried chicken.”

“Home projects should make things better, not worse.”

Those are some other recurring themes in my pep talks to myself that don’t just come at the dawn of a new year.

Back 10 or 15 years ago, there would more selfish goals like “buy a Jeep” or “start using Rogaine” listed in these notebooks.

I tore one of those pen-stained pep talks out while cleaning the desk off the other day and stuck it in a drawer.

It’s filled with my usual boilerplate goals and has the month of August, although I’m not sure of the year, listed on the top of the page. I’ve probably done something similar for every month of the year at one point or the other.

What I’m going to do is keep striving to be the version of myself that I long for.

What I’m not going to do is stop writing it all down.

I can remember being a kid and reading a Sports Illustrated piece on Emmit Smith. It was about his quest to be the all-time NFL rusher and how he believed that writing down his goals from a young age had helped him to realize those lofty aspirations.

I’ve wasted a gallon of ink by jotting down things I want to get done and still haven’t, unlike Emmit, who did break the all-time rushing record before retirement.

I’m not going to stop though, jotting down who I’ll be when I become the best version of myself.

Because I also find evidence of goals met in those old legal pads.

Times I wrote down names of a potential sports website that I wanted to start.

My wife reminded me the other day of a trip we took a year ago to Bay St. Louis to look at an appliance for sale on Facebook marketplace, as one does.

We didn’t get the stove we were looking at, but we had a good lunch and walked down to the marina and talked about things we wanted to do in 2025.

One thing we agreed on was taking a trip with our kids to celebrate our upcoming 20th anniversary. We did that in June and had a week of relaxing fun that I’ll never forget.

I also told her that 2025 would be the year that Y’all Sports went from dream to reality and I’m sure thankful for the folks that have helped make that happen.

If you have goals or resolutions that you’ve failed to meet, don’t be so hard on yourself.

We’ve all been there before and as long as you’re living, there’s still time to become the person you long to be.

My old high school basketball coach used to say, “when I stop hollering at you boys, turn your stuff in, because that means I’ve given up on you.”

He never did stop hollering, even at a lowly bench warmer like me.

And that’s what future Cliff tells himself when the calendar flips to a new year and the same goals dot the pages of yellow legal pads located in my home and car.

Don’t stop writing down those dreams, the big and the little.

Don’t stop seeking the good man or woman in the making.

Don’t give up on yourself.

Don’t stop striving.

Cheers to a new year.