I spent seven years in Indianapolis, the absolute best seven-year stretch of Peyton Manning’s NFL career.

It was a heck of a time to be a Colts fan.

Alas, I was not. For reasons that don’t matter, I’ve been a Jaguars fan since the Jaguars came to be. When Manning retired Monday, a friend asked for my favorite memory. I paid to watch him play probably eight games and saw hundreds more.

Without hesitating, I smiled and said: “2008, Scobee kicked a 51-yarder on the final play to beat him.”

I was at that game at Lucas Oil, rocking my teal, tattered Brunell 8.

I was in the minority, of course, even in my car on the way home.

My wife and children adopted the Colts as their own five minutes after we arrived in 2004. They wore 18 jerseys to work and school. Still do — just in Broncos colors now. A Manning Fathead still hangs in my youngest son’s room.

Why not? Manning owned the AFC South, which meant, he owned my Jaguars.

So twice a year, ours was a house divided — surely something to which SEC fans in Alabama and Mississippi can relate.

I didn’t mind their choice in role models. As the college and NBA editor for the Indianapolis Star, I managed coverage of a team that led the NBA annually in knucklehead-ness, a team so thoroughly out of control that Larry Bird actually had to tell players to stop hanging out with murderers.

The contrast to what Manning was doing, and how he was doing it, was as one-sided as most of his Sundays.

Manning led the Colts to seven division titles while we were there. He led them to a Super Bowl title. He won four MVPs as a Colt, three while where were there.

Manning changed Indiana’s Hoops Hysteria culture into an honest-to-goodness football town. Lucas Oil? Might as well call it Peyton’s Place, because without Manning, it doesn’t get built.

But I only had a back seat view, not terribly different from a Vols fan watching from their couch in Knoxville.

My former colleague, Phillip B. Wilson, had a far better view.

Part of the Colts’ coverage team, Wilson saw Hall of Fame greatness, on and off the field, for more than a decade.

I asked “PhilB” for a few memories. He wrote a novel, which makes perfect sense because he wrote a book on Manning and the Colts.

Manning inspired nothing less.

A few highlights, then, with a man who knows Manning better than most.

Q: As you reflect on Manning’s career impact, what stands out the most?

Wilson: What stands out most from the RCA Dome days was how the stadium used to shake when the noise levels really reached their highest decibels and the fans were going out of their minds. Sitting high above after the press box was moved to the top in the later years, you literally could feel the venue shake when the fans celebrated the biggest of wins and plays.

That AFC title game win over New England in January of 2007 sure stands out. I remember asking my colleagues, “Do you feel that?” The noise was off the charts, sure, but it was how the place literally moved.

Years later when writing my Colts book, I spoke to stadium director Mike Fox about that shaking. And he said it was actually by design. I thought maybe I was just imagining it, but he said that the RCA Dome was designed to move when so many were packed in there stomping and reacting to the games.

It had something to do with the structure having some give to the stress and strain of housing so many people. What’s amazing is the place held just 56,000 normally, maybe maxed out at a few more thousand, but it was enough to shake.

Peyton Manning, Marvin Harrison and Edgerrin James as well as others sure were responsible for a whole lot of shaking going on.

And, no, I never thought I’d feel that in a stadium. I haven’t since then, either, and I’ve been in most of the NFL venues, having covered games for two decades. It was unreal.

Q: We saw him do some amazing things in Indy. What was your favorite?

Wilson: It’s impossible to pick one. There were so many perfect throws, so many smart plays over the years. The naked bootleg in Buffalo in 2001 was unbelievable, especially after asking him how he pulled off a 33-yard TD run. He never told anybody he was doing it. His offensive line and none of his teammates knew he intended to keep it on the third-and-1 play. The call was designed to go right, and everybody else ran that way. The offense and the defense.

He literally fooled the other 21 players on the field.

When the Bills finally realized he had the ball, he was in the clear, nobody close enough to run him down. The score clinched the road win.

I asked him about it afterward and he said, “That was an Archie Manning Special there,” in reference to his father.

Manning always liked to quote Dan Marino in saying, “There’s no defense for the perfect throw.”

We kind of took those for granted after so many years of seeing them. But that naked bootleg, for someone who wasn’t exactly fleet of foot, showed just how smart he could be.

Q: What have you missed most since he left Indy?

Wilson: The first thing that comes to mind is the sense of knowing, regardless of whatever stadium you walked into, if Manning was on his game the Colts were probably going to win. It went beyond confidence. You just knew. Just like he just knew. And it didn’t matter how big the deficit, like that Monday Night Football comeback from 35-14 down with 4 minutes left to beat Tampa Bay 38-35 in overtime in 2003.

If Manning was still out there, the Colts always had a chance.

But the thing that we all miss most was how he managed the game on the field. No quarterback has ever had that much control. He would read the defense and with his encyclopedia-like brain would call a play from three series of options.

Most quarterbacks, even the great ones, will check to maybe one or two or three plays to audible. Manning expected all of his teammates to be on the same page with so many more than that.

He might pull out a play that wasn’t in the game plan. Whatever he thought would work. Because of how much he studied opposing defenses and defender tendencies, he eventually earned the trust of coaches to have that much control.

It’s in this way that Manning was the most unique quarterback to ever play the game.

People can debate the greatest of all time and knock him for playoff losses or winning “just” two Super Bowls, but those who criticize or didn’t cover him every day failed to realize just how unique it was to see him run the offense.

Sometimes, you would sit there and watch all of his calls, dummies or not, and say, “Just snap the damn ball,” but it was all part of his magic. As many players and coaches said over the years, after learning the hard way, “If you try to match wits with Peyton Manning, you’ll lose.”

And then, unsolicited, Wilson offered a few more stories to share:

On trash talking: Peyton wasn’t much of a trash talker. He was cerebral about everything. I was asking his O-linemen about how Manning never said anything to players, although they always tried to get under his skin by saying stuff.

Offensive guard Adam Meadows told me about one game where a defensive lineman was running his mouth non-stop. If he got a hit on Manning, he would say something. If he got close to him, he would say something.

Finally, after Manning completed another pass and the Colts were burying that team, Manning looked at the frustrated trash talker and said, “You’re not very good.” Meadows laughed when sharing the story.

On being a prankster: As I wrote in my book, Manning never did anything half way. That included his pranks. There’s a chapter about how he victimized a guy at training camp by chaining the guy’s golf cart on a dock in the middle of a lake at Rose-Hulman.

It was a common prank with different victims each year.

When the guy (Jeffrey Gorman) vowed revenge and got in Manning’s face about it, Peyton got him again. He and his accomplices (nobody ever admitted who they were) took the guy’s new truck and when the man woke up he thought it had been stolen.

He reported it to campus police, who later found the truck on one of the team’s practice fields. It had been wrapped in bubble wrap with those styrofoam shells loaded inside. The guy told me he never got revenge.

The moral of the story was: Don’t ever mess with Peyton Manning. You’ll just make it worse. Manning gave me permission to tell the rest of the story for the book. I didn’t dare publish it without his consent.

Parting thought: I would be remiss if I didn’t share my last 1-on-1 interview with him. I don’t recall when it was, but it was in the last year or two that he was in Indy. I was asking different players about what keepsakes they had from their careers.

I didn’t expect Manning to say much, but he surprised me by agreeing to do the interview. Then he told me about how he kept photographs taken with fellow players, teammates and opposing players, as well as coaches and other idols, in scrapbooks. He had so many photos from over the years. It’s something most people don’t know about him. And I’m guessing that would be an incredible experience to see those scrapbooks if he ever shared them.

Edge always referred to Manning as “P-Money,” as in you could bank on Manning getting the job done.

No athlete has ever been more clever at dealing with the media. Again, he never did anything halfway. Even after he went to Denver, when we did a conference call with him a year later, he answered questions on the phone and included many of our names, including mine.

The guy hadn’t spoke to me in months, yet he knew my voice, Mike Chappell’s voice and a few others. Pretty impressive. He had that kind of memory recall.

He always knew how to say something for effect, even if it didn’t mean anything. I recall in 2011 when he met with us monthly to give injury updates on his surgically repaired neck.

One quote that stood out, “I don’t know what H.I.P.A.A. stands for, but I believe in it.”

Of course H.I.P.A.A. didn’t apply to his situation, but most didn’t know that and the quote was still funny. We all laughed.

I was honored to be one of the reporters Manning phoned personally when he was leaving Indianapolis. I was surprised he called me. He thanked me for the stories and reporting over the years.

I thanked him and said it was an honor to watch him play.

Some said it was just Manning being smart with the media, always thinking about how he could spin something positively. I didn’t care why he called. I’ll remember that call the rest of my days.