If you’re old enough, surely you remember as a kid, sending two box tops or a coupon from the back of a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, then including a quarter (big finance in the 1950s), and sending it off to a P.O. box in Battle Creek, Mich., for some plastic trinket that took seemingly forever to arrive in your mailbox.

The mini-Nautilus submarine that ran in the bathtub on mom’s baking soda, or the really cool Superman insignia belt immediately come to mind, but I digress. Waiting for this stuff was sheer torture. When? Where is it? What’s the postman doing?  

That’s exactly how I felt about author Dan Verdun’s long-anticipated new book, “NIU Football” (256 pages, with a foreward by Joe Novak and published by the Northern Illinois University Press at $28.95 a copy), that finally made it to my doorstep Saturday. This is no insignificant trinket. Verdun’s book is more of a Huskie treasure.