By MONTE DUTTON

Time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana.

No. I didn’t think of that. It just makes me chuckle softly.

It’s amazing how long ago it was when certain things happened. Check that. When all things happened.

I was watching the British Open on Thursday. Announcers were talking about Tiger Woods’ first victory in what is now universally known as The Open Championship. It was in 2000.

Twenty-five years ago! Woods was then 24. Now he’s 49.

To me, Woods is forever young. And Rory McIlroy. So is Jeff Gordon. They’re not forever young, though. They’re not even young. McIlroy is 36. Gordon is 53. My favorite baseball player, Carl Yastrzemski, is 85. Willie Mays is dead. So is Johnny Unitas. So is Jerry West. So is David Pearson. I remember them all when they were on top.

Now I’m talking baseball in a high-school dugout and mention in passing some past great deed and observe that eyes are rolling, at which point I realize that not only was I 14 when it happened but my audience was more than a quarter century from being born.

Getting back to the lowly fruit fly, one was on my desk where a fountain soft drink had been, supping on the small pool of water left condensed by the plastic cup. I thought that, to a fruit fly, that little pool must have seemed like Lake Greenwood.

Then I smushed it with my index finger.

When I’m driving around town – and I’m usually driving around town because I’m too broke to drive any farther – I often listen to sports talk radio.

It’s not because I like it so much. Most of the stations I eschew are the ones whose semiliterate hosts talk around the clock, non-stop about gambling. Most of them have no more inside information than I do, and I don’t gamble.

Another local station talks non-stop, year-round, about pro football, perhaps because it has a tie-in with the Carolina Panthers. Late in the afternoon, that station conducts mock drafts for months on end leading up to the actual draft.

Football is at long last not too far away.

Today, at wit’s end, I tuned for a while to a popular country music station. I listened to three songs, all of them in the familiar, “hey, babty, let’s me and you go down to the lake, drink beer, and I’ll play a heap of songs that sound just alike on my old guitar.”

An astonishing number of songs have an endless number of lines that are quite similar: da-da-da-da-da-da-DAH-DAH, da-da-da-da-da-da-DAH-DAH, da-da-da-da-da-da-DAH-DAH, as in, “let’s go and get us a SIX-PACK, sit and listen to the DUCKS QUACK, then I’ll tell you how I LOVE YOU SO …”

Another observation: It’s been at least a decade since bars were smoky.

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