Roughly 20 years ago, during an otherwise forgettable game of tackle football at Kilauea District Park, my best friend Mark and I executed what we will forever argue was a tackle deserving of John Facenda narration.

At the time, our team was getting routed by the rival Miyakawa brothers, the stoutest of whom repeatedly tore through our defensive line like Nate Ilaua playing Red Rover with Laker Girls.

Late in the game, after another blown defensive assignment, I found myself curling into the path of that barreling back, his compact body building momentum with each stride, his eyes alight with one simple fact: Me windshield, you bug.

The wise thing would have been to slow down and mime a desperate arm tackle. Instead, I sped up, tucked my chin and braced for what I figured would be footprints on my chest and birdies in my head. I hit him just below the sternum, digging the balls of my feet into the soft, wet turf. My effort didn't stop him, but it did slow him for the second it took for Mark to fly in and send the three of us crashing to the ground.

Groggy but momentarily triumphant, Mark and I hooted and arm-bashed and strutted like the idiot 19-year-olds we were. And, through the months and years since, The Tackle has survived as one of those affirmative, self-defining stories that friends compose together, a memory that defies time with its evolving detail and clarity.

Current theory holds that our memories aren't simple imprints of objectively experienced events but pencil drawings of how, and how often, we consciously or unconsciously choose to recall our experiences. For men, the result is the "the older I get, the better I was" story.

I can't help wondering what effect the advent of YouTube — that great repository of human ingenuity and vanity where anyone with a digital camera can take his Warholian 15 in poorly-lit two-minute bites — might have on our ability to imagine ourselves and our world.

It's not as though the digital video age provides us with unfiltered truth. What YouTube offers us is a mix of staged reality and reality taken out of the context of actual time and place. Ultimately, it still requires interpretation, but subject and the scope are limited by the perspective of the camera. It's hyper-reality in a form even French theorist Jean Baudrillard never anticipated.

I'm not sure what to make of this. If video of that football game were ever to surface, my gilded memory of The Tackle might easily crumble beneath images of a guy with a football tripping over two skinny kids.

Clearly, some things are best left to the imagination.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.