When I was a little boy, I loved the imagery of the NBA.

At the library I regularly sought out books that encapsulated the photography of the NBA in the 1990s, flipping through the pages and admiring the imagery of basketball being played at the highest level.

Because of this, I’ve always been a little bit of a jersey snob/critic/admirer/enthusiast/whatever you want to call it for professional sports.

Back in the mid-to-late 90s, the NBA was full of experimental new looks with full logos and designs on the front of jerseys accompanied by small numbers. The Seattle SuperSonics, Milwaukee Bucks, Utah Jazz, Atlanta Hawks and Phoenix Suns all had some of my favorite designs from that experimental era.

With that said, I always noticed that teams wore white at home — with the obnoxious exception of the Los Angeles Lakers, who always wore gold at home and did not adopt a white alternate until the mid-2000s. I loved the Sonics’ hunter green road jerseys but I knew that if they ever played in Seattle, they were always going to wear white. That was just the way it was.

Growing up, I always understood that white was the home jersey for basketball and always expected that to be the case.

But once I started working at The Journal, I noticed something was different — high school teams in Minnesota always wear their colored jerseys at home. Every single time.

It felt so strange, so out of place to me. I have asked upwards of about 20 people why this was, but no one could give me a concrete answer.

“I would like to wear white at home, too,” MVL boys’ basketball coach Craig Morgan said Monday after his team’s 99-76 win against Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s. “It did come up about 10 years ago about switching the colors over. But I think people said they didn’t want to switch them over because it said [for example] ‘Chargers’ on their blue jerseys and ‘MVL’ on their white jerseys. That, I think, is the extent of it.

“I would say, look at it down the road in five years if we’re going to switch this over, start ordering new uniforms accordingly. I don’t know.”

For some silly reason, this has always bothered me. But there is an answer to this nagging question.

Kevin Merkle, associate director of the Minnesota State High School League and the authority on boys’ basketball in the state, confirmed in an email to me that home teams did in fact used to wear white jerseys way back in the day. The change did not come until a little more than 30 years ago, when the powers that be decided to make the colored jerseys the home attire because they thought it made more sense to wear the school colors in front of the home crowd.

Even though the National Federation of State High School Associations designated white as the home color, the MSHSL’s opposing designation was an “administrative” rule, as Merkle called it. That way, it was permitted to make the change.

As opposed to the standard in basketball, football is different in that teams always wear their colored jerseys at home and whites on the road. The Dallas Cowboys, however, decided to switch it up and wear white at home, supposedly so fans can admire the different colored jerseys of teams that visited Dallas to play.

Most of the NFL teams in the South also wear white at home during the early weeks in the season with the idea that darker colors attract more heat and will wear out opposing teams more quickly. I personally don’t like that teams do this, but then again, I’m not out there playing.

I can see where both sides are coming from and at the end of the day, it’s a topic that does not really matter in the grand scheme of things. I get that.

A good portion of Minnesotans probably think wearing white at home in basketball is goofy. Because it’s different here, the standard will always be different to them.

The NBA has slowly migrated away from that original standard. Teams are now permitted to both wear colored jerseys so long as they are different enough and easily distinguishable to the naked eye. Some teams even wear their colored jerseys at home and force the road team to wear whites so the jerseys don’t clash (in the event that they would clash, of course). Everything is up in the air at this point.

Personally, I would like to see these sports stick to the old standards: Wear white at home in basketball, colors at home in football.

But then again, I’m not the one who makes the rules so my two cents are worth as much as yours.