At the intersection of geography and enterprise, we just might have something here.

We’ll see, from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, August 8, at Barnes and Noble at Northtown Mall in Spokane.

Eleven months ago, I launched the first book written on the Apple Cup football rivalry between Washington and Washington State. Producing it was a long-running saga before it finally found bookstores and online outlets – 20 years of on-again, off-again (but mostly off) fits and starts.

I’d like to think it’s a worthy blend of history and color. The foundation of the book is an account of every game in the century-and-a-quarter rivalry, with interviews spicing the last 60 years or so.

But the other element of the book is just as important. It needed to capture the color of the rivalry, the juice, all the back-and-forth and hijinks and folderol that conspire to make a great rivalry. (Despite Washington’s dominance in it, I’m convinced it is a great rivalry, matching schools of remarkably disparate characteristics.)

So there’s a chapter on the first family of the Apple Cup – the Gustafson/Pelluers. There’s one on the history of trash-talking in the series. And there’s a monster, 10,000-word anecdotal chapter on the relationships between Cougars and Huskies; the often-weird circumstances that bring them together; the pranks they’ve pulled on each other; and just generally, some crazy things that have happened to the beat of two schools 290 miles apart meeting alternately in a world metropolis and on a hill amid wheatfields.

Naturally, authors like to get their work out there, and I brainstormed ways to do it. Then I remembered a phenomenon I’d always found intriguing, the habit of some former coaches to retire near each other in the lakes region east of Spokane. When it came to roots in the twilight of their years, the apple didn’t fall far from their successes.

There was Dennis Erickson, two years at WSU back in the 1980s before winning a pair of national championships at Miami; Mike Price, who beat the odds and took WSU to two Rose Bowls in six seasons after the school hadn’t been to one in 67 years; Jim Walden, a WSU coach whose teams contested good Washington squads as well as anybody; and Keith Gilbertson, who coached heavily on the west side of the state and logged time as a head man both at Cal and Washington.

A book signing with all of them would be a hoot, I concluded. One by one, I dialed them up, and, praises be, they all agreed. Sadly, Walden won’t be there; the loquacious, good-natured provocateur died early in July at 88, before he could regale us with his homespun humor and devil’s advocacy.

So it’s a foursome – three really good football coaches and I, who never coached a minute but spent a lot of time assessing how they were doing. It ought to be a blast.