“So here’s a good story.”



Mike Bohn is zooming down U.S. 32 toward Huntington, W.Va., his navy blue Nissan Armada slaloming through the changing leaves of the eastern Ohio countryside.



Bohn dabbles in sports administration at the University of Cincinnati, where he has served as athletic director since 2014, but his true passion is storytelling. He assures the rest of the caravan — which includes his wife, Kim, of 36 years and UC’s chief revenue officer Brandon Sosna — that this particular tale has “a neat little connection to Marshall,” which is where the Bearcats will kick off against the Thundering Herd in a few hours. But we’ll have to go on a journey to get there.



“The real subplot,” Sosna chimes in, “is if in six hours of car ride, Mike tells a story I haven’t heard before.”



(Spoiler alert: He does not.)



This one starts in the early 1980s when Bohn was a...