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More and more I find myself thinking I’m an old man.

At the ripe old age of 20.

All thanks to UCLA Recreation.

A few weeks into the dodgeball season, I keep looking back to those days in elementary school when I used to be a dodgeball all-star, almost always finding myself the last one standing at the end of recess.

Fast-forward 10 years to today: Now, after two sanctioned matches, I’m normally one of the first to be pummeled by the foam balls used in intramural play at the Student Activities Center.

It’s quite depressing, to say the least.

After all, I had such potential.

Had I been so skilled at an NCAA-sanctioned sport, you know top recruiters would have followed me all the way through high school and aggressively sought my signature on a letter of intent at the first legally possible moment.

Alas, here I am writing about college athletics instead of being the one written about.

Mine is a sad, sad story, shared, I’m sure, by hundreds, maybe thousands across the UCLA campus.

Students whose athletic prime came in their prepubescent years. Students whose sports traditionally are reserved for school-aged children – they have no place to shine at the collegiate level.

At least, they had no place until UCLA Recreation added dodgeball to the winter IM lineup.

Now that there’s a place to relive childhood memories, how simple would it be to add more sports of yore?

I can see it now. IM four-square and hopscotch playoffs at the Wooden Recreation Center. T-shirts for sale at the UCLA Store to commemorate the campus Red Rover and hide-and-seek championships. Teams practicing from dawn to dusk in the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden to improve their freeze-tag skills.

And you know before long the athletic department would see the popularity of these sports. Athletic director Dan Guerrero would have no choice but to call up NCAA President Myles Brand and get things rolling for intercollegiate kickball.

But I don’t really see things progressing so quickly.

I guess the members of the 57 registered IM dodgeball squads won’t get to live out the dream of being a varsity athlete on campus. Which is a shame, because I’m sure Adidas could design a backpack with a special pocket to display and protect each player’s favorite foam ball.

Still, the lack of a varsity presence doesn’t mean UCLA Recreation can’t step in and offer students refereed versions of their favorite playground games.

I think most of us would appreciate a little variety in the normal menu of IM basketball, football, soccer, volleyball, softball and now dodgeball.

Logistically, very little would be required to support these sports we remember so well: Most games we played back in the fourth grade worked for us back then because of limited physical resources that we had to overcome with basically infinite imagination.

It’s sad, because it’s almost as if we have the opposite situation today, what with the whole gamut of resources UCLA Recreation offers, thanks in part to our registration fees.

All the while we’re stuck in the rut of convention with sports played at one point in our lives only by the “big kids.”

Who said growing up means leaving behind the simple things that used to make life so much fun? That we have to run and lift weights to keep in shape instead of playing with a big, round rubber ball?

Why does maturity mean swimming has to be done in laps and not to the single voice and otherwise silence of Marco Polo, or without waterslides and Floaties?

Yet thanks to the reintroduction of dodgeball, I think it’s clear that it’s OK to play kids’ games with an adult body, regardless of how sore that body is the next morning.

Looper wants to be a kid again – they don’t have midterms. E-mail him with your ideas for new IM sports at elooper@media.ucla.edu.