Depending on your algorithms, R.E.M., the Athens, Georgia, rock band that had a 30-year run until their breakup in 2011, has been in the news a lot, mostly because of R.E.M.’s induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame earlier this month.

The occasion has me listening to a lot of R.E.M. again and reminiscing about my college years in Athens, where I moved from my hometown of Miami to attend the University of Georgia in 1989 after three long years in community college.

Miami is not the least bit Southern (culturally). My dad tried to warn me I’d experience culture shock in Georgia, but who listens to their dad? I mean he also said people would find a Miamian “exotic.”

They didn’t.

I awoke in my single dorm room my first day there, a Saturday, to the sound of people barking like dogs outside my window.

The school mascot is the Bulldogs, and so barking is a thing. It was a home game day, and my dorm was, unfortunately, close to Sanford Stadium.

I did what any lonely skateboarder apathetic about football would do, I hopped on my board. In ‘89, skating was underground.

If you ran into fellow skaters, you became fast friends. Some of the first skaters I met were local high school kids. Two of them would lead to my closest encounter with R.E.M.

You’d occasionally see band members around town.

One time I was walking alone downtown and saw R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck approaching me.

I made sure to act unimpressed, and in the end, just as he passed, he gave a friendly nod of the head and I snubbed him.

In the fall of ‘89, R.E.M. was still in the midst of its tour for 1988’s “Green.”

There had been much ado about the band’s signing with Warner Bros. after releasing its first five albums on the indie IRS label. I was a late arrival as far as fandom.

Most of the guys who skated my ramp were into punk and hardcore, but college rockers R.E.M. did have a cheerleader in this one guy, Mike, who preached the gospel of U2, R.E.M. and The Smiths.

I tended to be very reactive in those days, and so I wrote off all three bands, but eventually, darn you, Mike, I liked all three.

With R.E.M., it started with the catchy jangle-pop of “Can’t Get There From Here,” from 1985’s “Fables of the Reconstruction,” an album I first bought on cassette, and upon their release, I bought 1986’s “Life’s Rich Pageant” and 1987’s “Document” on vinyl. I was hooked.

Two of the kids I met skating were Chris Springfield and Noah Ray. They had the bright idea that since I was older and had a car, maybe the three of us could go see R.E.M.

After I met their parents for vetting, I drove us a couple of hours south to the Macon Coliseum, where they got me a ticket and backstage pass for R.E.M.’s Nov. 11 show.

How did they have this kind of clout? If you know the video for “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I feel Fine)” Noah is the kid skating in an abandoned house in the video.

I don’t remember exactly how he

came to be in the video, but it had

something to do with the bike shop skate team Noah and Chris skated for, which also employed a member of the Athens band Pylon, opener for the Macon date of the tour.

In the coliseum lobby, I ran into Alison, a girl I’d met at orientation and had begun briefly seeing.

I had naively told her “Let’s just be friends” because I didn’t want to end up in a relationship before I had a single friend, which would have been very me of me. We did not end up friends.

In Macon, she lunged for the Green Tour backstage pass sticker on my shirt and said “Give that to me!” and “How did you get that?” I felt some smug vindication as I introduced Noah, I’m sure.

Noah’s video appearance failed to impress the other girls I playfully tried to introduce him to as the kid from the video. The video was just two years old, but I may as well have been speaking Greek. Not a hint of recognition, even though the video had been in frequent rotation on MTV and the song had made it to No. 69 on the Billboard Hot 100. This led me to think signing to Warner must have netted R.E.M. more promotion and fans. Then again, maybe the girls didn’t want to be bothered by three young men with a sketchy story about a music video.

R.E.M. played a whopping 36 songs across three encores. After the show, Chris, Noah and I went backstage. Nothing was happening back there, but we did see and say hello to the guy they knew from Pylon. Then singer Michael Stipe came down a hallway with the charcoal or whatever he put under his eyes like a football player. He nodded at us from maybe 30 feet away, opened a door to a presumed green room and that was it.

The only other time I saw the band in real life was a couple of years later, maybe early ‘92, at The Globe, an Athens bar where I was having a beer with my older sister. R.E.M.’s four members, Buck, Stipe, Bill Berry and Mike Mills, were at a round table in the center of The Globe, and everyone in their orbit seemed to studiously ignore them, as I had done with Buck on a nearby sidewalk.

I never saw them in real life again, but I remained a fan and bought many of their subsequent albums. The wistful last single they released, “We All Go Back to Where We Belong,” had me in tears when it came out in 2011. It’s both breezy and melancholia-tinged, and somehow the perfect note to go out on.

For their Songwriters Hall of Fame induction, R.E.M. played an unplugged version of “Losing my Religion,” but they’ve remained adamant that fans shouldn’t expect a reunion, not wanting to tarnish what they created for short-term gain, which seems like something R.E.M. would say.

We were lucky to have them around.