The jumbo Sunday crosswords that appear under the imprimatur of the New York Times … had been kicking my butt.

Seventeen straight that I failed to complete without a mistake. Making me wonder if the canary had stopped singing in the coal mine of my brain.

I completed one on February 20 but, through May 8, all I had was failure.

A few, I note beneath the puzzle as having come close … but a few more puzzles never allowed me to establish a beachhead. My notes jotted under three of those puzzles read: “Total BS … ridiculous … beyond ridiculous”.

Which struck me as fair comment … but also would be the sort of comments I would make when I had lost enough gray cells to see my performance decline.

It did not help, of course, that the puzzles originally appeared in NYT from 1988 to 1992. Lots of dated information there. Pop stuff, cabinet secretaries and the usual dollop of French/German/Latin words.

Then, I had a thought.

What about trying some Los Angeles Times puzzles from their Sunday editions? I have some in the house. So I fetched one and got to work …

And suddenly I got much smarter. Senility had been pushed back to its starting point. Seemingly.

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The first week of June brings to mind two history-changing military actions in World War II involving the United States. Arguably the country’s finest hours, when it comes to warfare.

–D-Day, June 6, 1944, which was 73 years ago today.

–The Battle of Midway, June 4, 1942,

Most Americans with a passing knowledge of U.S. history know about D-Day.

They may not know about Midway, fought two years and two days earlier. But that victory was hugely important in the war against Japan, and it also is a great story — of courage and resolve and also more than a little luck.

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For quite some time now, I have not been good at staying up all night. When I was younger, sure. Not anymore.

Either I fail at it, and wake up several hours after whatever I was waiting for is finished, or I make it through the game or the flight and then sleep badly and get up feeling as if I have just come off a plane that flew overnight from the U.S. to Abu Dhabi or France.

In this case, it was the latter situation. Home-induced jet lag in pursuit of the NBA.

But when we have an interesting NBA Finals, one that could give us as few as four games over a span of 16 days, and along comes Game 2 and it starts an hour earlier …

You have to watch. Even if it means you wake up feeling like you just got off the red-eye from Los Angeles to Paris.

Even if it means watching the Golden State Warriors overrun the Cleveland Cavaliers.

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Most Los Angeles Dodgers fans remember when Yasiel Puig was going to be something special. It was five years ago this week that he was called up from Triple A and for a spell looked like the Mike Trout of the National League, except with a stronger throwing arm. He was on my fantasy team, and I loved him.

What a treat for Southern California baseball fans! Mike Trout over in Anaheim and Yasiel Puig doing the sensational in Chavez Ravine!

Well, we still have Mike Trout, as soon as he gets back from surgery.

We now are five seasons down the road from Puig’s sensational first month, and coming up on four seasons since his one good season.

Which leaves us where?

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Many Americans seem to think the NFL’s Super Bowl is the world’s most-watched sports event. To be sure, 114 million television viewers, thereabouts, is a big crowd.

But the Uefa (European) Champions League final easily wins the “most viewers” statistic with what has been around 380 million watchers, in recent years.

Tonight’s final pits soccer clubs of planetary renown, in Real Madrid and Italy’s Juventus, and will be played in prime time in Europe as well as Africa and, if anything, 380-million viewers seems like it might be a little low.

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, and Europe’s elite clubs are well known and widely acknowledged to be the best in the world. They have lots of fans outside Europe, particularly in Asia and Africa.

However, the Champions League final does not overpower the Super Bowl in some respects.

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I saw the headline: Twins Turn Triple Play … and, sure, I went to the video. The Twins were playing in Anaheim Stadium and I wondered which of the Angels’ slugs had managed to hit into a 5-4-3 (round the horn) TP.

But what really struck me, as the video began?

Well, have a look/listen, see what you think.

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For more than a decade, Michelle Kwan represented what we in the journalism call a “standing story”.

A standing story is one that is news at any time. Work or play, good or bad, any developments warrant coverage and follow-up because we believe our audience has significant interest in the topic.

Particularly so, in my case, because Michelle Kwan trained for years at a rink just up the hill from where I was sports editor … and also because I covered the four Winter Olympics where she made appearances — though she skated at only two of them.

It wasn’t like I (or her fans) forgot about her; she was one of the most popular of U.S. Olympians when she finally exited the figure-skating stage, in 2009, announcing she would go to school rather than attempt to compete at the 2010 Winter Games — where she would have been making a fifth attempt at winning Olympic gold.

Thus, she ended her career with two Olympic medals (a silver and a gold), five world championships and nine national championships.

But no Olympic gold.

Kwan has done several interesting things since 2009 … school, political activism (she campaigned for Hillary Clinton), a board-of-directors role with the Special Olympics and a 2013 marriage — now in the process of being ended — to the scion of a Rhode Island political family.

I knew little of any of that, and would have remained uninformed had not Kwan been photographed while visiting an Abu Dhabi skating rink last week.

I worked in the UAE for seven years, and public-relations people still send me information, and …

There was Kwan, looking trim and fit, at age 37, on the ice at Zayed Sports City in Abu Dhabi, perhaps giving some tips to the UAE’s No. 1 female skater, Zahra Lari.

Presumably she was there to meet with Abu Dhabi authorities ahead of the 2019 Special Olympics World Games, to be held in the UAE capital in March of 2019.

And it brought back memories of that Michelle Kwan “standing story” I was always following, from about 1993 through 2006.

The outlines of it go like this.

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No one looks good in the “booking” mugshot. Well, except for this guy.

The booking photo taken at the police station is the one you do not want anyone to see. As Tiger Woods can attest to, this week, after his arrest for “driving under the influence”, in Florida.

It looks like he is having trouble focusing his eyes. Untrimmed facial hair generally is not a good look for any of us. And the thinning hair of a 41-year-old man …

It certainly falls under the heading of adding insult to injury. Everyone knows he was arrested … and then the booking photo shows up.

Most everyone looks disheveled in the booking photo and, well, guilty of something. At the least, of bad grooming. Even celebrities. Or especially celebrities.

And then I thought of another agency that prints really bad mugshots … and makes a person carry them around.

That would be the French government.

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Mike Trout played 857 games in the major leagues without visiting the disabled list.

Of course, as long as he continued to use the headfirst slide as his preferred means of getting to a base in a hurry … it was nearly inevitable he would hurt some key part of his body.

The headfirst slide puts at risk all sorts of fragile body parts that are particularly crucial in baseball — fingers, hands, shoulders, faces.

Trout? His headfirst slide at second base on Sunday — hey, he was safe on a steal!  — yielded a ruptured ligament in his left thumb, an injury to be addressed via surgery tomorrow and to be followed by “six to eight weeks” on the shelf. Which is pretty much a death blow to a team as weak as are the 2017 Angels.

The big question is … why is anyone still using the headfirst slide?

Why, especially, is the best player in baseball risking his career by using it?

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Francesco Totti ended his 25-season Italian football career over the weekend, getting in his 786th match for Roma, the only club he has ever known.

By the time it was over, Totti, 40, and many of his legion of fans were in tears, shattered by the end of an era.

The New York Times suggests that Italy, and especially an increasingly dysfunctional Rome, is in a rough patch these days. Uncollected garbage, a balky transit system, homelessness and crime on the streets.

Watching one of Rome’s native sons play for the local team had become one of the few pleasant things in life that could be counted on.

The prolific forward also was someone fans could laugh with, given the dozens and dozens jokes in which Totti was held up to kindly mockery of his Roman accent and “dumb jock” image.

Totti was gracious enough to embrace the phenomenon, having two books of jokes — theoretically about him — to be published. They turned into best sellers, and all profits went to charity.

Here is a roundup of some of the Totti jokes:

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