One of the few highlights from my lackluster and abbreviated high school football career came in a JV game when my brother, a junior tailback, and I, a sophomore wideout, both scored touchdowns.

My brother scored on a nifty run around the right side, and after crossing the goal line, he simply handed the ball to the referee. A few minutes later, I pulled in an 18-yard touchdown pass from our quarterback and, being unfamiliar with proper football etiquette, also handed the ball right to an official.

Little did I know then that I was missing out on a grand opportunity for artistic expression. Apparently, as a wide receiver, it was my right, and some might say duty, to do something over the top in the manner of celebration.

It wasn’t entirely my fault that I blew my chance. At the time my pass-catching role models included such Hall of Famers as Jerry Rice, James Lofton and Steve Largent, men who, upon reaching the end zone, “acted like they’d been there before,” a phrase coined by Fred Biletnikoff, another Hall of Famer.

So I wasn’t the one to blame for acting with class and dignity. I just didn’t know there was another way of doing things. I suppose I could have tried to emulate Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, who did funky dances following his scores, but I knew that my white hips were not equal to the task.

So now here it is 15 years later, and wide receivers have made the act of scoring a touchdown seem much less important than the celebration that follows. Mind you, today’s receivers didn’t invent touchdown dances or fancy posturing, but they have turned celebrating a score into some sort of grotesque game of one-upmanship.

The main instigator in this arms race, as you may well know, has been the 49ers’ Terrell Owens, who got the ball rolling, so to speak, by trying to spike it in the middle of the Cowboys’ star at midfield during a game in Dallas a few years back. For his trouble, Owens got tackled by an incensed Cowboys player.

But that was nothing compared to Owens’ masterpiece that would come a couple of years later. You remember the incident, I’m sure. After scoring a touchdown, Owens pulled a Sharpie from his sock, autographed the ball and handed it to a friend of his in the stands. The incident garnered Owens leaguewide criticism and a hefty fine, but it also landed him an endorsement deal with the pen manufacturer.

That premeditated act seemed to get the rest of the league thinking. Granted, most people thought it was pretty obnoxious, but apparently a bunch of other wideouts did not.

The culmination of that line of thinking finally came to fruition just last week, when two high-profile wide receivers took the art of touchdown celebrations to new lows, or possibly highs, if you consider the fines they incurred.

First came Chad Johnson, a wide receiver for the heretofore lowly Bengals. One would think that playing in Cincinnati would be cause enough to keep a player humble, but not Johnson. His crass post-touchdown performances this season have already cost him a hefty sum, so after scoring a touchdown last Sunday, he went to a TV camera and held up a sign that read, “Dear NFL, please don’t fine me again!!!”

Fittingly, Johnson was fined $10,000.

That was nothing compared to what came later in the day, however. During the Saints win over the Giants, New Orleans wideout Joe Horn scored a touchdown and then, in an absurd act of premeditation, retrieved a cell phone that he had stashed under the padding at the bottom of the goal post and pretended to call his mom.

I hope he got through, because the call cost him $30,000 in fines from the NFL.

One can only guess what comes next. After Horn’s phone episode, what else is there? Will some future wideout grab a trumpet from a band and literally toot his own horn, or will someone pull out a handheld TV so he can watch the replay of himself scoring?

Your guess is as good as mine, but right now the sky, or perhaps $50,000, seems to be the limit. What it will take to pull down such a prodigious fine I have no idea, but I wish I was the one who’d thought of it first.

Oh, I wouldn’t have done it upon scoring my little JV touchdown. I couldn’t afford a fine of two bucks, and I’d likely have gotten benched for my actions. But it would have been cool to imagine just how big a jackass I could have made of myself.