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Gold and Black Illustrated is celebrating 30 years of publishing. Over the next few weeks, we will look at each publishing year, recalling the moments that took place in that particular year.

Note: Captions describing each cover are not available on mobile platforms.

The beauty of sports is sometimes things come from where you least expect.

As much as the heat could be on a coach like Matt Painter after a couple of sub-par seasons, this was an important season for his program. The 2014-15 team was young and played like it early, losing at home to North Florida and Gardner Webb. It stood just 8-5 overall before winning 11 of its first 15 conference games and earning a spot in the NCAA Tournament.

The play that in some ways reflected Purdue's resurgence came in Indiana's Assembly Hall courtesy of grad transfer Jon Octeus. Now, up to this point in the season, Octeus had served Purdue well with his defensive abilities and his knack of being in the right place at the right time.

But this play took things up to the next level. Boy, did it ever.

But my best memory of that year is that we at Gold and Black got the photo. Our freelancer, Jamie Owens, who covered IU hoops, no less, snapped the defining image. It's the one that will always be remembered. Where time stood still, while Octeus made his unforgettable flush.

Tom Campbell had so many of the best images for us over the years, but we were no longer sending him on the road to shoot men's basketball games, short of the NCAA Tournament. Looking back, I was lucky to have hired Owens that night, as the image made for a great two-page spread in our fourth print edition of the publishing year.

Like Octeus, I guess, we were in the right place at the right time.

Swagger.

Octeus's aforementioned dunk had it. And we were trying to help showcase a little bit of it in this football preview cover with Tampa's own Anthony Brown and Frankie Williams.

It seemed every year, we had internal arguments over how and whom to showcase on the cover of our football preview. After all, we were dealing with a football program that didn't have much momentum or interest. Left with little positive to talk about or create interest (not that it was our job to do so), we did something a little different on this cover.

Williams and Brown had fun with it, and we had some fun putting it together. Yes, it was another long season for the Boilermakers in 2015, but at least our cover focused on something that is a staple of successful teams and programs: Swagger.

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