Happy 40th anniversary, Trivial Pursuit. Few things humbled me as you did.

Because I have a memory for useless information, similar to “Cheers” know-it-all Cliff Clavin, initially friends or family would say, “I get Lynn!” for their teams. It wasn’t long before I would see them look at each other, eyebrows raised, whenever I answered.

Playing individually wasn’t much better. I accused an attorney — an attorney! — of cheating because he immediately answered “Reykjavík” when he got a question about the capital of Iceland.

“Nobody knows that answer off the top of their head,” I insisted. “You read the questions and the answers before we came over to your house.”

Trivial Pursuit-styles of competition have moved from living rooms to bars — or to places like the Denver Press Club — where there are all sorts of tournaments. As a rule, I don’t participate. I know better.

But I got talked into it when the Colorado County Clerks Association played bar trivia during its winter conference in Colorado Springs one year. Elections gurus Pam Anderson and Peg Perl were among my team members, and thank goodness for these two Ken Jennings types.

I remember contributing only once, when the question, I believe, had to do with reference books or something like that. I came up with Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and Roget’s Thesaurus. Shockingly, both answers were correct.

Any questions that night about songs and music might as well have been in Chinese. I’ve never downloaded a song on my phone (I don’t know how), I don’t know who sings what, and when I recently moved, my CD collection fit into a shoebox.

Music for me is what sports was like when Trivial Pursuit was all the rage. That was before I followed sports, so I did anything to avoid landing on orange, the color for the “Sports and Leisure” category. I started randomly answering “Joe Frazier” and “Willie Shoemaker” because it seemed as if their names came up a lot.

“What’s the only host country not to win a gold at its own Summer Olympics?” “Willie Shoemaker.” “Willie Shoemaker is a jockey, not a country.” “For what radio station?”

At times I knew enough to have a 50-50 chance of getting the question right. “What is the name of the Iowa State football team?” It was either the Cyclones or the Hawkeyes, but I jokingly answered, “Joe Frazier.”

So there I was during one game, sitting in the center square, one question from winning. My competitors of course chose the orange category and immediately regretted it.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Listen to this. ‘Who won the Fight of the Century on March 8, 1971?’”

“Willie Shoemaker.”

My sports knowledge improved greatly during my first years in Colorado. The Rocky Mountain News’ sports pages were regularly honored as some of the best in the country. And as I drove across the metro area for my police beat shift, I regularly listened to sports on KOA.

When the Rocky closed, my sports reading slowed down until Cameron Wolfe worked at The Denver Post. He was one of several Post interns to live in my basement. My nieces and nephew down the street loved him and would call if they saw a story by Cameron in the paper.

When I read his stuff, I knew that kid was going places. He now covers the Miami Dolphins for ESPN.

But I remember a dinner one night with some Post sports folks. I don’t remember why Editor Greg Moore invited me, but we got to talking about the Broncos’ first Super Bowl win. The Packers would be denied their chance at back-to-back victories.

“Who did the Packers beat the year before?” someone asked.

I looked at Moore. “Ask Greg,” I said. But he drew a blank.

“The New England Patriots,” I said.

It was not the first time Moore, who used to work for The Boston Globe, would shake his head in disbelief over something I said.

Let me just mention one other game, Speed Scrabble, which I willingly played thinking I would be fabulous. I was a journalist. I wrote sentences for a living. But I was still turning over my first seven pieces when someone announced a word. It never got better.

Every time someone said, “On your mark, get set, go!” I freaked out. Someone at the table asked if I had Tourette’s. Seriously.

After a couple of years, I learned to joke about that game. They were coming up with “feline leukemia” while I struggled with the word “cat,” I said, when explaining why I wasn’t interested in playing Speed Scrabble ever again.

I hadn’t thought about Trivial Pursuit in years, but recently, when eight of my nine siblings were home in South Dakota for Thanksgiving, we recalled that there was a year or two when Trivial Pursuit was almost as popular during the holidays as our addiction to hearts, spades, court whist, pitch and other card games.

In Cliff Clavin style, I said the first time I played was in Gallup, N.M., when the attorney down the street said he had bought this hot new board game and did I want to come and join them. I worked for the Gallup Independent from 1980 to 1983, so it had to come out during that time period, I said.

I looked it up on the master trivia website, Wikipedia. Two Canadian journalists created the game on Dec. 15, 1979, after finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing. After it was fully developed, it was released in 1981.

The traditional 40th anniversary gift is ruby, but cheaper options include red candles or red glasses.

Might I add “red-faced?”