Funny thing about memories. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last week, but I do remember Jimmy Collins playing basketball in Allen Fieldhouse.

And that was 34 years ago.

Collins, head coach at Illinois-Chicago University, the talented mid-major Kansas University will meet in its NCAA Tournament first-round game Friday night at Kemper Arena, played as a collegian at New Mexico State.

I realize New Mexico State and NCAA Tournament don’t usually appear in the same sentence, but the Aggies were a powerhouse in 1970, ranked No. 5 nationally and favored to win the four-team NCAA Midwest Regional in Allen Fieldhouse.

Collins was N.M. State’s standout. The 6-foot-2 senior guard averaged 24.4 points a game, even though he had an unorthodox jump shot. Collins wrapped the ball behind his head, sort of like former Kansas three-point shooting whiz Terry Brown did.

The Aggies had a couple of other talented players, too, in Sam Lacey, who later logged several seasons with the Kansas City Kings (now the Sacramento Kings) of the NBA, and Charlie Criss, a quicksilver 5-foot-8 guard.

N.M. State’s coach was Lou Henson, now 72 and the team’s head coach again after a two-decade interlude at Illinois, where for 13 years Collins worked for him as an assistant coach.

One of the aides on Henson’s staff at N.M. State back in 1970, incidentally, was Rob Evans, now coach of the Arizona State team Kansas played in last year’s NCAA Tournament and the man who recruited Keith Wooden to Tempe, Ariz., out of Free State High.

New Mexico State came to Lawrence that March looking a bit funky. The Aggies were one of the last teams in the country to wear sleeved uniforms, yet their skills were far from archaic.

Interestingly, Collins and his NMSU teammates walked into a similar NCAA scenario to what Illinois-Chicago will face against Kansas. The Aggies’ first-round opponent was Kansas State.

Granted Allen Fieldhouse is not the Wildcats’ home away from home like Kemper Arena is for the Jayhawks, but Manhattan is only 90 miles from Lawrence and the ‘Cats obviously had more fans here than the Aggies did.

Unranked Kansas State gave the Aggies all they wanted, too, but Collins scored a game-high 23 points and NMSU survived, 70-66. K-State coach Cotton Fitzsimmons lamented the fact his team made only 12 of 29 foul shots.

Do those free-throw numbers remind you of anything? If you’re a die-hard KU fan, you no doubt remember Kansas made only 12 of 30 charities in the 2003 NCAA title-game loss to Syracuse.

Speaking of Syracuse, that’s where Collins is from. Most people think he’s from Chicago because he was a first-round draft choice of the Bulls and spent all those years at Illinois, yet he was a high school contemporary of Jim Boeheim, current coach of the Orangemen.

Collins wasn’t the only New Yorker on NMSU’s roster that season. Half of Henson’s players were from the Empire State, including two others from Syracuse.

Asked by the Syracuse Post-Standard why he wound up three-fourths of the way across the country in Las Cruces, N.M., Collins replied: “I was led to believe New Mexico State was integrated.”

When he arrived, Collins found there were only three black girls on campus.

“One was heavy, but a nice girl,” he told the Syracuse paper. “One was a graduate student. And one was not pleasing to the eye.”

When the 1970 NBA Draft rolled around, Collins was pleasing enough on the Chicago Bulls’ eyes to go as the 11th overall pick — the first three picks that year were Bob Lanier, Rudy Tomjanovich and Pete Maravich — but Collins was, for whatever reasons, a pro bust. He lasted two years with the Bulls, then logged a couple of seasons in the old ABA.

Now at the age of 57 and in his eighth year as UIC’s coach, Collins seems to have found a home at last in the Windy City.