At this year’s National Futures Tournament in Virginia Beach, I was sitting under one of the tents that the City of Virginia Beach had set up at the National Training Center when one of the California Futures teams walked by. I caught the eye of Vianney Campos, who coached the team, who I got to meet a few years ago as a winning coach of one of the Rumble teams.

Her assistant coach for the Futures team was also coaching a Rumble team. “I’m Haley Exner,” she said, extending a hand.

My mind raced into overdrive. I engaged in conversation with the goalkeeper that had the most shutouts in the history of the National Federation, but I also knew that about 15 minutes earlier I had run into the one goalkeeper who has a great chance to break that record. Where’d she go? I thought.

But the coaches, now on the staff of the debut team of the University of California, Davis, had to catch flights out of town and I never got the two goalkeepers — the recordbreaker and the rival — to meet.

Why do I mention this? I’ve always wanted this website to reflect history — not just the present, but with as full a view of the past as possible. That’s because of an incident that happened the very month I started this site.

I was talking with perhaps the single most recruited lacrosse midfielder in the country, who was playing field hockey that fall. In the parking lot, I made reference to Gary Gait.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

I don’t know whether I masked the shock or not, but a high-school lacrosse player not knowing who Gary Gait was?

Since then, I’ve made it a point to try to weave the old and the new, to try to make sure that the newer generation of field hockey or lacrosse player got to know who their forebears were — and to not only make today’s player understand who they were trying to emulate or surpass, but why.

That’s why I got such a kick out of the Wimbledon men’s final last Sunday. Assembled in the front row of the royal box were Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, and Peter Sampras, all of whom had won a dozen majors or more.

I also get a kick out of TV shows that do the same thing. Last fall, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the 1958 Colts-Giants NFL championship game, members of the two teams and their contemporaries on the Indianapolis Colts and New York Giants teams (which had won the 2007 and 2008 Super Bowls, by the way) were interviewed in groups as they watched game footage. Adam Vinatieri, the Colts’ kicker, was paired with Pat Summerall, the Giants’ placekicker in 1958, for example. It was an inspiring and intelligent show.

Sometime this fall, I’m hoping to get the greatest field hockey goal-scorer in the National Federation to come out to see the latest challenger to her 23-year-old mark. The logistics might be tough: she’s a mother of two and a working professional at a university in a major population center.

But where there’s a will, as they say …