Right now, I have a 19-year-old daughter.

She is amazing in many ways, but doesn't take much notice of stuff beyond her inner world of school, work, new puppy, friends. It's not like she has lots of time to engage in public policy discussions or think in depth about Pakistan.

So imagine, for a moment, a group of 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds, far removed from home, in many cases a thousand or more miles, lured by the promise of a free education in exchange for developing their talents on the football field.

Imagine, if you can, that this was before Twitter and Facebook, and even before cell phones and e-mail.

And then imagine that those kids were given a lesson in religion and civil rights -- and how theirs were being violated -- all at once by someone from nowhere near Wyoming who was much older and had earned a position of respect as the head of a student group.

"We were all kids -- 18-, 19-, 20 years old," said one of them. "Some guys didn't fully understand the impact of what was happening, and once the ball started rolling it all happened so fast," he told author Ryan Thorburn.

In October 1969, one of my best friends was the daughter of a law school professor. Within hours, she and I found ourselves on polar opposite opinion paths.

Were it not for her untimely death several years ago far too young, these 40 years later, we would still be on polar opposite paths.

This view is not one popularly held, nor is it similar to ones expressed in these news pages in the past several months.

But it is my view.

And that is that Lloyd Eaton and his assistants, including the beloved Fritz the Dad, were not the bad guys in the Black 14 incident. The players were led to believe by someone outside of their group that their civil disobedience would make a difference.

It certainly did make a difference, but not in the way an 18, 19, 20-year-old might expect.

"We thought we had to do something about it. Students were expressing their rights all over the country," one told Thorburn.

And so 40 years have passed. Eaton, Fritz the Dad and other key figures in the drama like Gov. Stan Hathaway, are gone.

Many of the players have once again become media darlings, recalling in great detail the injustice that was dealt to them.

The world runs on rules. College football teams -- the good ones at least -- have rules.

Eaton had many rules, including players will not form themselves into groups of factions but act as individuals; and players will not participate in student demonstrations of any kind, the second of which he later modified to permit players to demonstrate as long as it was not on the football field.

My thoughts on this subject are based completely on emotion -- and having been there. Five years later, many of my best friends in the world were black players who Fritz the Dad and his staff recruited from places like deep LA, New Jersey and Detroit.

They came to Wyoming to get a free education and develop their skills on the football field.

Bless them, and all who have followed since.

Community News editor Sally Ann Shurmur can be reached at (307) 266-0520 or sallyann.shurmur@trib.com. Read Sal's blog at tribtown.trib.com/Sal/blog and follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WYOSAS