You’re a college sophomore and this is the biggest night of your life. You’re still a backup, but games like this are why you came to Boise State as the highest-ranked recruit in the state of Idaho. Your coaches yell and yell and yell about violent hands and punishing hits and killing the guy with the ball. Your defense just dominated against the big shots from Oregon, with their Nike money and their ugly uniforms and all their big conference advantages. You’re 19 years old, you’re completely overflowing with testosterone, and you see the guy who said they owed your team an “ass-whoopin’,” the guy you and your teammates annihilated. So you talk a little trash.

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You’re a college senior. You spent two years busting your ass in junior college to get noticed. You could’ve gone anywhere after that, but you went 2,900 miles away to some place in the opposite corner of the country because you didn’t want to wait your turn to play. And it paid off. You rushed for more than 1,000 yards last year splitting carries. Now you’re the lead dog. You’re 22 years old and people are saying you’re a big-time NFL prospect. But tonight, you stunk up the joint. You ran for minus-5 yards on eight carries. Less than zero. That’s pathetic. To make matters worse, it was all on national television and it was against this team you hate because they’re always hitting after the whistle and they knocked out your quarterback last year and they have that stupid blue field and they’re all way too excited and what did that jabroni just say to you? So you take a swing.

You’re a 31-year-old grown man who writes about a football team for a living, and you’re interrupting another grown man’s workday to pester him about some stupid thing he did as a college kid eight years ago.

Who’s the asshole?

Byron Hout knows what you’re going to ask. The former Boise State defender gets the same two questions whenever someone finds out who he is. You want to know what he said that made LeGarrette Blount punch him in the face after his Broncos beat the visiting Oregon Ducks 19-8 on September 3, 2009. He says he stands by what he’s said every time someone’s asked him the question: “How’d you like that ass-whoopin’?”

As for your second question, it happened so fast, he honestly can’t even tell you if the punch hurt. It was eight years ago, man.

But just because he knows your questions and he knows your angle doesn’t mean he’s unwilling to talk about it. Hout, 27, is a coach now. He’s all about teaching moments, and that was one hell of a teaching moment.

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Mind you, Hout was no slappy as a player. After the melee and its endless replay loop, Boise State went on to finish the season undefeated, beating TCU in the Fiesta Bowl in the days before there was a playoff to determine the best team. Hout moved from the defensive line to linebacker in his final two seasons, earned all-conference honors both years and finished his career as part of the winningest class in Boise State football history.

He loved the game, of course, so when his senior year was finished, he turned his attention to the next phase of his football life. With a couple invitations to try out for NFL teams on the table, he got a call from his former special teams and linebackers coach asking if he’d be interested in coaching. After a day to think it over, he joined Jeff Choate as a graduate assistant at Washington State and he’s been coaching ever since. Now he’s living the dream as the defensive line coach at Montana State, where Choate is the head coach.

It’s funny, actually. It’s been long enough now that most people, especially the kids he’s coaching or recruiting, don’t really know he’s that guy. He doesn’t necessarily make a point of telling his players about that night as much as he keeps it in the back of his mind as a reminder of how you’re supposed to act. Or, rather, how you’re not supposed to act. After all, football is all about controlling your emotions, and sometimes being a tough guy means knowing when to walk away. The good news, he says, is that he doesn’t have to use it as an example because they have good kids who are buying into the culture. He talks a lot about the culture they’re cultivating at Montana State. He is a football coach, after all.

Usually, defensive line coaches are the ones you can identify just by volume. Yelling is part of the job description. But even though that sounds like the kind of thing someone who’s most famous for a singular bit of yelling might enjoy, he doesn’t necessarily think he fits that stereotype.

“The way I coach is the way I played. Higher energy. Detailed,” he says. “I think guys could probably say that I’m a high-spirited energy out there. There’s times where you have to get in a kid’s face, but that’s definitely not something I enjoy.”

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Has he talked to or seen Blount at all in the last eight years? That’s another one he gets a lot. Not since Chris Petersen and Chip Kelly arranged a phone call the day after everything happened. They both apologized and ended that conversation by wishing each other luck. And yes, he’s followed Blount’s career over the years. It’s been impressive to watch.

There’s one other question he knows you have to ask. It didn’t take very long for people to start speculating what Hout said to turn his face into a punching bag. Someone on the internet heard from someone who would know who heard from someone else who heard from someone on the Oregon team who said whatever Hout said had an ugly racial component to it. He knows this question is probably coming, but that doesn’t mean he likes it.

“People are going to say what they want to say and believe what they want to believe,” he says. “I know the truth and I’m going to live my life in truth always. People can speculate, and all I can do is hope that the people who know me know that there’s no way I could possibly have said a racial slur there.”

You want to believe him.

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LeGarrette Blount has had a remarkable NFL career. To be entering his eighth year in the league as a running back? As an undrafted one, no less? You don’t see that very often, especially from someone who seeks out contact the way he does. He has over 5,000 career rushing yards on his odometer, more than the 13 running backs who did get drafted in April, 2010.

Last season with the Patriots, at age 30, he had his best season, setting career highs in carries and yards and a league-leading 18 rushing touchdowns. And, oh yeah, a second Super Bowl ring. He loves the game, and he feels blessed to still be able to play it for a living, now with the Philadelphia Eagles.

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When you approach Blount in the locker room after the millionth practice of his football career and say you want to ask him about a minor mistake he made eight years, 1,200 carries, and a lifetime ago, you expect him to say, “I’m not talking about it. Next question.”

Frankly, you wouldn’t blame him if he punched you right then and there.

Instead, he’s gracious with his time, and you talk about what it takes to make it in the league this long, graduating from hungry, undrafted rookie to sage veteran, his other stops along the way, and what he thinks of the young running backs in the Eagles locker room.

Then, when the conversation winds down, you apologize for bringing up the Oregon thing. It’s not like people are intermittently bothering you about something you did when you were an emotionally immature college kid. And was he even in the wrong anyway? It’s pretty unlikely that he would have snapped without being provoked by something truly inappropriate, or at least thinking he heard something along those lines. And as Chris Long, his teammate last year in New England, says, “If that had happened in hockey, he would be the man.”

He says he understands, you have a job to do. Then you tell him that you actually talked to him yesterday. The guy, Byron Hout. The kid he punched.

“Oh yeah?” Blount says, surprised. “What’s he doing now?”

So you tell him. And he pauses.

“We were both young kids,” he says, getting up to walk to a meeting. “He’s not a bad guy. I don’t hold grudges against anybody.”

Does this come full circle? Would the two of them be where they are today if it weren’t for a few split-second decisions made by very young men? Maybe Hout really did learn a valuable lesson, and the wisdom imparted by his coaches then convinced him he wanted to coach too. Maybe Blount wasn’t drafted because of the insipid “character questions” NFL teams like to throw around, and maybe that gave him an extra layer of motivation that’s propelled him. Or maybe it was just one moment of countless impactful moments in the lives of two people with a connection that only lives on because of the indelible way it was captured on camera.

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“It’s a great example of what not to do and how not to be a good sport, for both of us,” Hout says. “But I don’t think it was a defining moment. If you look at where we both are now and the successes each of us has had since then, I don’t think you can attribute it to that moment at all.”

He’s probably right.