MORGANTOWN — This was one of those days that you anticipate every year with nothing but happy thoughts, like a birthday, Christmas, the day you spot your first robin of the spring or the morning when you see that first winter snowflake fluttering gently toward earth.

The West Virginia University football media guide came in the mail.

Can Noel Devine be far behind?

This, of course, is the bible of West Virginia football and if it isn’t what it once was — thanks, in part, to NCAA restrictions on size that have limited its content and thanks, in part, to an NCAA regulation that stops schools from printing recruiting guides, forcing them to use 54 pages of sales spiel to recruits disguised as information — it remains a staple of every football program.

The cover this year leans toward a truly solid senior class of Mountaineers who will carry the team into the 2010 season, with Devine, the Heisman Trophy candidate, flanked on one side by fellow seniors Chris Nield and Jock Sanders and to his left by Sidney Glover and J.T. Thomas. A football is in one of Devine’s hands and it appears that he is handing it off to you while his right hand is extended, almost as if he’s ready to shake yours.

But the wonderland of West Virginia football is what you come across once you open the cover and peek inside. Indeed, most media guides — and I use that term even though years ago schools realized they could push their guides to the public and dropped the term “media guide” in favor of “football guide” — are similar in content.

It’s how you use it that turns it simply from a dry statistical look at the history of the program and at the current team and its roster that makes the book so fascinating.

If all you want is stats and dates, they are all there. Indeed, you want to know what WVU’s record against Syracuse is all-time, it’s there (27-30-0 in a series started in 1945) or who scored the Mountaineers’ first postseason touchdown (Nick Narducci on a 12-yard run in the 1922 East-West Bowl against Gonzaga) it’s there, too.

In fact, you can even learn that Narducci also threw the first WVU touchdown pass in a bowl game, that coming later in the day, making him something of a Paleozoic Era Major Harris or Pat White.

The point is that if you have a question, the book almost certainly will answer it and, somehow, you get a bit more satisfaction by flipping pages until they are dog-eared to find the answer than by simply Google-ing it.

The other day, for example, a friend who has moved from Preston County to South Bend, Ryan Boring, asked a question about how much Devine was bench pressing these days and, to be honest, I didn’t have the answer.

Then the media guide arrived. Bingo, there it was as it went through the team’s weight room warriors. It’s almost amazing to think about, because at 5-7 and 178 pounds bench presses 445 pounds and squats 500 while also possessing the team’s best vertical jump of 38.5 inches — two and a half inches more than Robert Sands, Tavon Austin and Jock Sanders — and has the best standing broad jump at 10 feet, 8 inches.

All of a sudden, you began understanding why Devine has grown into that Heisman Trophy candidate that is on the cover.

Going back to the theme that it is all in how you use the book, let us next look at one Patrick White, the quarterback whose reputation was as the greatest running quarterback in the NCAA’s history. In fact, he ran so well that his passing seemed uncertain in comparison and that may have even hurt him in the draft as NFL teams felt he could not throw well enough to play in the NFL.

But when you look at White, you soon come to realize that only Marc Bulger completed more passes in his WVU career than White, 630 to 507, and he became a Pro Bowl quarterback. If you look even deeper you come to realize that Oliver Luck is third all-time at 466.

Again, using a little imagination, it hits you, too, that Luck is second consecutive WVU quarterback to become WVU’s athletic director, following AD emeritus Ed Pastilong, who completed somewhere about 400-something less passes than Luck as a backup QB.

White, by the way, is second to Jake Kelchner in passing efficiency at WVU and holds the school record for completion percentage at 64.8 percent, disproving those who felt he was inefficient as a passer.

The idea is, some people you don’t think of as players really were quite accomplished. Take defensive line coach Bill Kirelawich. Who would imagine that Kirelawich, a veteran of more than 30 years of coaching still holds the Salem College record with an 89-yard touchdown, for a score.

That, of course, is far more surprising than the fact that he’s sent nine D-linemen into professional football.

Then there’s safety coach Steve Dunlap, who still holds the school record for his 28 tackles in one game against Boston College in 1974. What Dunlap doesn’t tell you that it didn’t matter much, B.C. beating WVU, 35-3, that day.

It almost doesn’t matter how you look at it or what you look for, there’s something there of interest.

• WVU has had seven first-round draft picks – Pacman Jones, Anthony Becht, Renaldo Turnbull, Brian Jozwiak, Chuck Howley, Joe Marconi and Joe Stydahar.

• WVU has a losing record on Fridays, 26-28-1 … and plays Marshall on Friday night on the road this year.

• The Mountaineers in the 1990s had 28 players drafted, 25 in the 1980s, 20 in the 1970s but only 11 in the first decade of the 2000s.

• And finally, you might be able to make a case for former corner/safety Brian King as the best DB in school history, holding the career record for passes broken up with 54, far ahead of Aaron Beasley and Lance Frazier, who were second at 38.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.