When you’re a young person like I am, you go through cycles every few years where you seem to attend or be invited to be a part of an unusually high number of weddings.

As such, I found myself up in Gadsden recently as a groomsman for my college cohort Dr. Adam — the co-founder of “Sketchy Bar Food Night” and the person who helped introduce me to the wonderful world of field herpetology. He and his lady love, the incomparable Dr. Haley , were finally getting hitched, and I was proud to be asked to be among the legion of guys to stand with him as he entered into that union.

We were a veritable Justice League of Groomsman, so much so that we even had superhero T-shirts given to us as groomsman gifts (Mine — Superman, obviously, because of me being a journalist and my aversion to green things.)

As a group, we don’t get to see each other that much since leaving college, so it’s always nice to be able to see one another, catch up and retell stories and recall events we’ve talked about a million times before.

• The birth and evolution of the drinking game “Magic Cup.”

• The Velociraptor in the Door Incident (which probably came from too many rounds of “Magic Cup,” to be honest … we’re still sorry, Dr. Clontz).

• The Redneck Christmas where we went Trailer Park Caroling and may or may not have urinated all over a mutually loathed person’s trailer.

Essentially, the normal idiot behaviors undertaken by all college students.

It’s those times in life that you look at one another and say things like “How are we not dead?” or “Why weren’t we arrested for that?” that make life worth living — and provide the glue with which lifelong friendships are formed.

We’re all older now, some with wives, babies and the other accoutrements of rapidly approaching being 30-somethings.

But, over the weekend, one phrase, asked by the groom’s brother, let me know no mater how much we changed, we were all still us.

“So, have you castrated any bats recently?”

As weird as that question was, my brain started humming the Porter Waggoner version of “Green, Green Grass of Home.”

I was amongst my people.

I was home.

Cliff McCollum is managing editor of Gulf Coast Media. He can be reached at cliff@gulfcoastmedia.com.