There’s just something about an old photo.

The power can open a portal and pull you back in time and tug those nostalgia strings with just a glance. The yellowed edges of an old film shot are best but an open tab of a Google photo album from January 2010 did the job this week.

Those were heady times, just on the cusp of smartphones crossing the threshold from early-adopter novelty to everyday household items. So it was still a digital point-and-shoot camera, freshly acquired from Santa, who made the trip west to document another budding revolution.

As a first-year beat reporter covering Alabama football for The Decatur Daily, a trip to Southern California to cover the BCS national championship mixed adrenaline with anxiety. High stakes. This was a slumbering powerhouse hungry for its seat back at the big kids’ table that, in this case, was the Rose Bowl Stadium. And that’s fitting considering that classic setting was home to the Crimson Tide’s original statement of intent. That 20-19 win over Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl that secured the school’s first national title was documented with black-and-white photos now decaying in museum vaults.

Anyway, it was this shiny and new, but pixel-deficient silver square of a camera that filled the January 2010 photo gallery unearthed this week. Tapping the thumbnail shot pulled this not-as-young, no-longer-a-beat-writer through the wormhole to a time when Alabama and Texas were the last two standing.

Just the idea of these two bluebloods fighting for national supremacy with this old Hollywood backdrop had to be documented. Alabama rode the wave of unseating Florida in the SEC title game that famously ended in Tebow tears — a win players would later say was the singular off-season mission that even dwarfed winning its first national title since the film camera days.

The Longhorns were four years removed from ending USC’s dynasty in the most photogenic way possible. Vince Young’s scamper for glory became one of the most iconic shots of the decade — a framed Daniel Moore if he’d only been born in Austin instead of Birmingham.

Four years later, it was Colt McCoy’s turn. And we know how that turned out but the early photos in this Google gallery revealed media day shots of a still-hopeful Texas quarterback. A few frames earlier, Greg McElroy and his full head of red hair followed a stand-alone shot of the crystal football trophy.

Relics of the past indeed.

So were the shots of Brent Musburger and Jon Gruden. Mack Brown looks about the same, but the shot of Nick Saban’s media scrum was a throwback. Not a single phone blocked a view, just some TV cameras and professional-grade cameras surrounded the coach on the cusp of starting something legendary.

It’s fair to say Saban had a more youthful look still on the other side of 60. He’d won a national title at LSU six years earlier but was still, for a few more days, on the outside of college football Mt. Rushmore conversations.

The gallery makes a quick pivot from press events straight to gameday.

Bevo’s arrival, palm trees, empty stadium shots.

It was all fresh, unplowed snow for almost anyone associated with Alabama — especially a young beat writer amazed to be along for the ride in Year 1. The Crimson Tide hadn’t been this close to the crown since ruining Miami’s coronation in the 1993 Sugar Bowl, snatching the title that would have been that dynasty’s fifth in the previous 10 years.

That New Year’s Day conquest in New Orleans wasn’t exactly the beginning of Alabama’s post-Bryant return to glory, but conditions were ripe as smoke from the pregame show hovered over kickoff under the Rose Bowl lights.

This classic uniform batter between Alabama’s crimson and Texas’ burnt orange devolved into a sometimes-sloppy affair — streaky and with a streaker. The zoom on the point-and-shoot strained to capture the clothed field intruder promoting a long-since defunct gambling website.

Alabama struggled early, falling behind 6-0.

Then Colt got hurt.

The Crimson Tide scored the next 24 points, weathered a second-half Texas comeback and planted its flag square in the chest of college football.

Shaky postgame snapshots feature Mal Moore, a smiling Saban in a jacket covering his red Gatorade-stained shirt and that crystal football so delicately passed from player to player.

It was all so new.

“This is not the end,” Saban famously said a few weeks later at the national title celebration in Bryant-Denny Stadium. “This is only the beginning.”

Turns out he was right.

Five more national titles and almost 1.5 decades later, Alabama’s coming back to Pasadena. Again they’ll face a blueblood, but this time for the right to play for another championship 10 years after the BCS bowed to the playoff.

Texas, fittingly, is also back. They’ve been through the badlands and utter college football irrelevance to snap pics on their iPhone 15s ahead of Monday’s Sugar Bowl semifinal. There they’ll face the Washington program Alabama upset in that 1926 Rose Bowl a year after the 35mm camera was invented.

Memories.

They’ll fade. So will the photos.

Life’s obviously much different for us 14 years since Alabama’s crimson last touched the Rose Bowls’s thick green carpet. Saban’s now arguably the greatest coach of all time, Greg McElroy and Mark Ingram are now TV personalities and some are still wondering just how it all would be different if Colt never got hurt.

We’re all a little older, in different jobs, new homes. Families. Kids. All just hazy visions of an unrealized future the last time passing this way.

One day we’ll look back on this return to Pasadena as a marker in history. Where that last trip in 2010 was the beginning, this is mathematically closer to the end. Time comes for us all.

So, here’s to gathering in another decade on some still theoretical technology and reflecting on the low-grade smartphone shots.

We can appreciate this moment for what it becomes, one snap at a time, laughing at how little we knew about what was to come.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.