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Shekai Mills-Knight, a freshman running back for Ole Miss, will earn some attention Thursday night when his Rebels take on the Miami Hurricanes in an NCAA semifinal football game in Glendale, Ariz., but he first made news a decade ago as a grade-schooler deemed too big for the local little league.

At 9, Mills-Knight, living Dollard-Des-Ormeaux in suburban Montreal, was listed at 111 pounds, which made him 11 pounds too heavy to carry the ball in a league with rigid weight classes. Officials refused to let him play running back, and forced his team to forfeit four wins. For the record, his family maintained that his official weight was a typo, and that young Shekai actually scaled 101 pounds.

It’s an important distinction. If he’d had a tall glass of OJ at breakfast and then weighed 101, a quick pee break might have put him back below the limit. But if he was a full-fledged 111 then he might as well make like Terence Crawford and find a new weight class.

His family protested the decision as far as they could, but Football Quebec upheld the position restriction, and losses remained on his team’s record.

Clearly, football worked out anyway for Mills-Knight, who wound up starring in five sports as he finished his prep career at Baylor School in Chatanooga, Tenn. He totaled 25 yards on eight carries as a freshman at Ole Miss, but his Derrick Henryesque dimensions – 6-foot-3, 220 pounds – and bulbous muscles hint at his future potential.

At 19, he’s young enough for us all to imagine how much better he’ll be in two years, but 10 years after his youth-league controversy, he’s also old enough to remember when rules mattered. The league said he needed to weigh 100 pounds, and stripped his team of victories to prove they meant it.