I visited Northwestern University in April during a trip to Chicago. My tour guide was a chatty, generically pretty blonde junior who, for the purpose of this story, I will call Sarah.

I was accompanied by a half-dozen fresh arrivals from the West Coast, and none of us, least of all me, were dressed for an Illinois winter. Since winter in the Midwest is year-round, this tour found me pretending I was Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild as my sneakers froze into tiny black-and-white igloos.

“So,” said Sarah, raising an eyebrow while I mentally composed my application to the University of Hawaii, “tell me about yourselves, guys. Where are you all from? What sports do you play? What’s your school’s mascot?”

This put me in a tight spot. The first two I could answer. But what, I asked myself, was my school’s mascot? Sure, I could say “the Blues,” if I wanted everyone else to laugh at me. I whiled away precious time thinking as kids answered one by one. “The Panthers,” said one. “The Lions,” said another. “The Trojans,” said a guy dressed up like a late-eighties Tom Cruise. I decided to crack a joke at Mr. Ray-Ban’s expense, then realized everyone was looking at me expectantly.

“The Blues,” I finally muttered. Not surprisingly, everyone laughed at me. “The blue whats?”

“Just the Blues. It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

Mulling it over, I realized that this episode begs a question. Just what is our mascot? Technically, according to Athletic Director Greg Angilly, it’s the color blue. According to Charlotte Worsley, our most recent actual mascot was a House of Blues — But that was so long ago that hardly any of the Urban students whom I asked — even seniors — had heard of it before.

UHS has the Red Devils. Lick has the Tigers. We can do better than that. The Fixies. The Urban Legends. The Urban Outfitters. Maybe our mascot is Dan Murphy. Or maybe our mascot is really obscure, and you’ve probably never heard of it.