When I first heard about the Notre Dame football player with the imaginary girlfriend I thought, "He just got busted for something my circle of friends (and myself) did on a regular basis throughout high school."

That something being creating a girlfriend that doesn't exist. It's easier today thanks to the Internet, but that means it's also easier to get caught.

For those who simply pay no attention to sports whatsoever, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Teo (50 percent chance I spelled that right) had an exclusively online relationship with a girl in another state for THREE YEARS only to find out she didn't exist.

How he could go three years and not know she didn't exist has been the subject of a lot (a LOT) of debate, but he claims he wasn't in on it and was just as shocked as everybody else. Some say that's a big crock and he used the imaginary girl's imaginary death last September as a way to gain emotional points in his quest for a Heisman Trophy.

I'm sure all that will eventually come out in the wash. We're here today to talk about the time-honored tradition of having a girlfriend in another town/state/country (yes, country).

When I was in high school, the biggest thing aside from the discovery of fire was having a girl actually notice you were alive. At my social level (a shovel for heavy digging was required to reach that level), girls, of any kind, did not notice you. It had nothing to do with their looks or social standing. They just simply did not know you existed.

At first, around freshman year, you live with it and even make jokes about your loser self, most of which can't be printed here. But somewhere along the line, toward the of sophomore year, and especially in your junior year, it begins to eat at you.

The problem starts when somebody, maybe in your social circle maybe in another low-level circle, somehow manages to acquire one of those mysterious creatures known as a girlfriend.

You don't know how he did it, but he did and it makes you mad, mainly because he now acts like he's quarterbacking the football team and dating the head cheerleader.

What to do? Well, you could put your best efforts into getting your own girlfriend, but that would lead to a lot of humiliation and you get enough of that simply by being a teenager.

No, the only obvious solution is to make up a girlfriend. The safest way to do this is make sure she lives in another state, just far enough away to make sure no one can check out your claim. Remember, this was (way) pre-Internet, so the only way to check it out would be to drive to the other state. This would be impossible because in addition to being invisible to the fairer sex, we also were without a car.

Most of us chose Kentucky, as both the Georgia and North Carolina borders were too close to Monroe County. Occasionally a braver soul would declare he had a girlfriend in Madisonville and we'd all scramble for the phone book to check names.

When we couldn't find a name, he'd say she was only in Madisonville during the summer when she visited her grandparents, who had a different last name. When we demanded to know their last name, he'd say he didn't know what their name was because, "I ain't dating them, you morons!"

To pull this off, you had to act extremely arrogant about your girlfriend, and you definitely had to claim she was hotter than anything Sweetwater High School had ever seen, even though the "non-hot girls" in that school routinely laughed at us.

The name was also important. One kid, every time he mentioned his Kentucky girlfriend, she had a different name. But looking back I'm pretty sure he was making fun of the rest of us.

I always preferred Michelle, but that's because being the feminine version of Michael (or is Michael the masculine version of Michelle? Which came first?), it was easy to remember.

This wasn't limited to Sweetwater. Somewhere along the line, singer John Mellencamp released a song that contained the line, "He just made that up/there ain't no girl in Kentucky."

We had an excuse for our imaginary girlfriends. We were what we were. But why a 6'2 rock solid linebacker for Notre Dame has to have a "girlfriend in another state," well, maybe some day we'll get the answer, but it seems like he could have been beating them off with a stick, as the old saying goes.

As for me, I've got a girlfriend in New York. Her name is Bey… um, Michelle. She only comes down in the summer to visit her grandparents, who live in another town. All true.

michael.thomason@advocateanddemocrat.com | 442-4575