Football being a contact sport, one where defensive coaches task players to collision receivers and thus re-route them, you can forgive Kansas tight end Jimmay Mundine for not immediately remembering his meeting with Darwin Cook last season.

“Darwin Cook?” he asked. He wrinkled his forehead for a moment and quickly scanned a list of 2013 collisions, knowing it must have been a good one if he was being asked about it eight months later. The name just wasn’t ringing a bell, which was ironic since we were discussing a bona fide bell-ringing.

“Oooh,” he said. “Number 25?”

Winner.

“I remember what you’re talking about,” he said. “I caught it and once we ran into each other I dropped it. I remember because I stayed standing and everybody was like, ‘How did you stay standing?’ But my chest was hurting so bad after it happened.”

The 5-foot-11, 200-pound Cook was helped to the sideline. The 6-foot-2, 240-pound Mundine remembered coming out for the next play, a third down before Kansas kicked a field goal to cut WVU’s lead to 7-3 in the first quarter.

“At the moment when it happened, I was almost, like, in shock that I got hit that hard by something else,” Mundine said.

At the end of the first half, Cook’s body, at long last, gave up on him.

Months later, as he prepared for the NFL draft, Cook said he wasn’t right after the collision with Mundine, which was pretty obvious. It gets harder and harder to put yourself back together again the longer and more painful a long and painful season progresses.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been in the game — and he shouldn’t have — but he was used to playing hurt or sore, and he was also a guy who let a nagging injury affect his practice performances a year before, which led to a seat on the sideline. He wasn’t about to forfeit his spot on the field.

“He missed (running back James Sims) and pulled his hamstring on the run,” Mundine said. “That was just a bad game for him.”

Mundine wasn’t trying to be rude. What he meant was that it was out of character. He respected Cook as an opponent, and opponents generally only know one another by their numbers anyway, especially as time passes them by.

That Mundine so quickly recalled Cook as Number 25 is something of a compliment, and the memory reminded Mundine of the time he met quite a match.

“I don’t think about it in the sense, ‘He didn’t catch James because I hurt him,’ but after looking back at it, I definitely know if I was feeling that way and I stayed standing and he went to the ground, I know something was bothering him,” Mundine said.

“I remember even after going back out there for a little bit I was still iffy in there. He hit me more in the chest with his head. I didn’t hit my head, just my chest, so there could have been a little more going on.

“It was a really hard hit, though. I went from going full speed to a dead stop and he went from going full speed to right on his back.”