If you were to put together a dream team of some of the most accomplished and influential basketball journalists of the last 40 or 50 years, you might start with Bob Ryan. The semi-retired Boston Globe columnist is as respected a basketball writer as there is on the planet, and as recognizable a figure in Boston sports as any non-player. That's due to his decades of coverage dating back to the late 1960s, when he started as a Celtics beat writer.

After Ryan, you might tab his onetime Globe colleague Jackie MacMullan, now a senior writer for ESPN. She's authored or coauthored some of the seminal books on the NBA's golden age, including 2009's When the Game Was Ours with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. And since she played Division 1 hoops for the University of New Hampshire Wildcats, Jackie Mac would be an asset if and when a pickup game broke out.

Middlebury's Alexander Wolff would be a natural choice, too. He's a longtime Sports Illustrated writer and author of the 2016 book The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama.

And speaking of SI writers, the captain of this little dream team would almost have to be Jack McCallum. After all, he wrote the book on the real Dream Team.

McCallum, 71, is a former SI senior writer who started at the magazine in 1981. He's the author of Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever, a 2012 book about the 1992 U.S. men's Olympic basketball team.

He's also the author of, among numerous other books, :07 Seconds or Less — My Season on the Bench With the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns, for which he embedded himself with the Suns for the entire 2005-06 NBA season.

Presently, McCallum is teaching a sports journalism course at Middlebury College for its winter semester, the second year in a row he's taught that class at the school. McCallum's son Jamie, also an author, is an associate professor of sociology at the college — though the sportswriter says it was actually another Middlebury prof who suggested he teach the class.

As part of that intensive course, on Wednesday, January 15, McCallum moderates 'A Night of Hall of Fame Hoops,' a panel discussion with Ryan, MacMullan and Wolff at the McCardell Bicentennial Hall at Middlebury College. (BTW, if you wanted to round out our dream team's starting five, you could include sportscaster Curt Gowdy. Each panelist, including McCallum, is a recipient of the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, hence the evening's title.)

Ahead of the event, which is is free and open to the public, Seven Days spoke with McCallum by phone.

On most Sunday afternoons during football season, a certain subset of NFL fans routinely descends upon Ruben James, the college-y sports bar and dance club on Main Street in Burlington. Unofficially, RJ's is the city's "Bills bar," where Buffalo Bills die-hards gather to root on — and in recent years, largely lament — the downtrodden AFC East club.

It's been a rough couple of decades for Bills fans since the early-1990s glory days of Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas and Marv Levy, when the team ruled the AFC and made it to four consecutive Super Bowls. But in early September, at least, hope springs eternal for NFL fans. And as a new season begins this week, there's reason for guarded optimism in Buffalo — and by extension, at RJ's.

When fans tune in to watch the Bills play the division rival New York Jets this Sunday, much of the intrigue will center on Buffalo's nimble, rocket-armed, second-year QB Josh Allen and a feisty defense. But locals might also recognize a familiar face roaming the Buffalo sidelines.