As a getting-to-know-you exercise, I thought it was high time to share my Desert Island movies: the five titles that, if stranded alone with no other forms of cinematic entertainment, I could happily watch over and over until I eventually perished – or at least until the WiFi disappeared.

If you find yourself missing sitting in stadiums and arenas, or even in front of the TV, with your best friends and some nachos and a cold beer or six (or is that just me … ?), consider turning or returning to one of these five – make that six – outstanding, inspiring sports films from 1981 to 1996. Advance apologies to those looking for golf movies. Might I suggest that you instead get outdoors and golf?

As a change of pace from recent articles showcasing five similarly-themed offerings that debuted when I was between three and 26, allow me to present a compromise of 77 winners from the period of 1995-99: my official-in-print 10-favorites lists from the ends of those years, and what those lists would now look like after 20-plus years of consideration and reconsideration.

The following home-viewing options are five works that, for whatever reason, scared the bejeezus out of me as a child and now make me almost nothing but happy. The Towering Inferno ain't among them. Some phobias are eternal.