GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) – There’s a book out about the Green Bay Packers titled “The Greatest Story in Sports.”

The four-volume epic tips the scales at 13.7 pounds – almost 14 pounds.

If delights could be weighed, they would bust the scale.

Author Cliff Christl and I were colleagues at the Green Bay Press-Gazette and tussled on the YMCA basketball court.

His book is extraordinary, and not just for being more than a thousand pages.

All you have to do is thumb through any of the volumes to find precious nuggets Cliff Christl has found.

If you have lived in Green Bay some amount of time, you will bump into names – lots and lots of names you have heard time and again.

Along the way in my thumbing came the realization that everybody who lives here has stories about the Packers.

Just one game at Lambeau Field has somewhere around 80,000 in-person stories.

Even if someone says, “I hate the Packers,” that’s a story.

Cliff Christl’s book is page after page of stories – the daunting struggles and times of glories over the first 100 years.

He is a warts-and-all writer, so there are weighty disclosures about some of the team’s icons.

On the other hand, sometimes you can hear a chorus singing, like parts of his recounting of the Ice Bowl.

Overall, Cliff Christl weaves an elaborate tapestry of story upon story, name upon name about a football team known by so many in many, many places only by weird and wonderful circumstance.

The funny thing is – in an ironic way – the book ends but the story goes on.

Living in Green Bay is really, really interesting.

It’s a storybook place, and Cliff Christl’s book helps bring definition to that thought.