For no reason at all. It went way longer than I expected, so, I don’t know, print it out and read it on your commute home or something.

What follows may seem a bit ridiculous, but it’s all true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty.

In suburbia, or at least my neck of suburbia, high-school kids prank other high-school kids by covering their homes and the surrounding trees and bushes in toilet paper. It’s reasonably harmless — nothing more than a pain in the ass if you’re on the long end of the high jinks, a morning spent pulling toilet paper out of your hedges (for some reason some people try to blast it out with garden hoses, but that’s actually a terrible idea. Wet toilet paper is way more difficult to get down than dry stuff).

And it’s one hell of a rush to do the toilet-papering: A huge group of kids working in unison in absolute silence, watching as a property becomes blanketed in white tissue, your collective efforts quickly and stealthily reaping tangible, visible rewards.

At our school, the boys’ soccer team toilet-papered the girls’ soccer team and vice versa. Same for basketball. Same for lacrosse. That left the football team at a loss for a traditional toilet-papering rival, and though occasionally we tried to forge something with the girls’ volleyball squad, it rarely held. So we developed a reasonably nasty habit of toilet-papering the crap (pardon) out of anyone who quit the team midseason, or who otherwise pissed us off whatever reason.

This is how we came to John Wallenheimer’s house one Friday evening in the beginning of my senior year.

Wallenheimer, I should say, suffered through a situation not dissimilar to the one Gregg Jefferies faced in Queens some 10 years earlier. His family had moved to town the previous winter from New Hampshire, and with them came talk of his older brothers’ athletic exploits: One had been an All-State football player, the other a near NBA-caliber hoops star.

Our football team sucked, but our coach — a great man who really did deserve better — was nothing if not a perpetual optimist. Hearing word of the older Wallenheimers, he pegged so many of his always-lofty hopes for the next season on young John.

Only then in August when practice started, John Wallenheimer was nowhere to be seen. And when he finally showed up a week late with no explanation anyone found satisfying, he wasn’t particularly good. Not terrible, either, just nothing close to the player we — and our coaches — dreamed he might be.

Perhaps because he was a new kid or perhaps — who knows — due to the pressure that comes with unreasonable expectations, he never really fit in with the rest of the team. He quit the week before the season started. Rumor had it he said some nasty things about some of the other guys on the squad, too.

So long story short we set out to toilet-paper the kid’s house. I’m not saying it was a decent thing to do to a new kid in town who obviously had some early trouble making friends and I’m not saying it’s something I’m proud of looking back on it, but it was something we were doing nonetheless. It was high school, leave me alone.

We went to Pathmark, bought as much toilet paper as we could afford, cracked a joke to the cashier about having stomach problems, and assembled as a team in the parking lot.

By then we knew the protocol: We took all the toilet paper out of its packaging and evenly distributed it into the trunks of seven cars. Next, we evenly distributed football players into those same seven cars, mapped out the route to the Wallenheimers’ house and established a rendezvous point at a local elementary school in case anything went wrong.

The procession drove to the area and turned onto the Wallenheimers’ street — headlights off, music down. We parked a half-block away, emptied out of our cars, popped the trunks, and gathered arm-loads of toilet paper. Sticking to lawns so as not to create the type of racket associated with a full football team stampeding on pavement, we jogged down the block to the house.

The house had but a few trees and wasn’t great for toilet-papering, but that never stopped us before. I threw the first roll.

It’s a gorgeous sight when it’s heaved the right way, the tail of paper cascading behind the spinning roll, the roll hooking over a tree branch and dropping to the ground with a small thud. And it’s one of those things where once one goes, a bunch soon follow, like car horns honking in traffic or, I presume, muskets firing at Revolutionary War battles. So soon enough there were 30-some rolls of toilet paper flying, hooking, streaming, covering various parts of the Wallenheimer’s property.

It was short-lived.

I don’t know if we made too much noise with our first round of throws or if the Wallenheimers were a particularly vigilant family, but before I could throw a second roll I spotted a break in the Venetian blinds in the front window and a pair of eyeballs peeking out.

Now, generally in a mild-mannered suburb like ours if someone caught you toilet-papering their house they just kind of came to the door and shooed you away, and you ran because the clandestine aspect of it was part of the fun, and because it didn’t seem right to just go on throwing toilet paper on someone’s hedges while he was standing right there watching you do it.

So spotting the Wallenheimer at the window, I called for everyone to get out of there and we scrambled toward cars.

In this case, my instincts were spot-on.

I don’t know if they don’t have toilet-papering in New Hampshire or if the Wallenheimers just took particular offense to the prank. But they were not content to just stand on the front stoop shaking fists. Oh no.

Out of the door came a stream of Wallenheimers that, I promise you, lived up to everything our coach had told us about their athletic prowess. They were huge and they were fast and they were absolutely terrifying. I don’t know how many there were — I was running away — but it was definitely way more than one football dude and one basketball guy. The Wallenheimers were legion. And they must have had some sort of dedicated sporting goods closet right inside their front door, because they were all brandishing various items of athletic equipment to be used as weapons: baseball bats, hockey sticks, tennis rackets.

And here’s the exceptionally weird part: They were naked.

Not like bear-ass full-frontal or anything. Just various stages of undress, ranging from, say, tank-top and boxers to shirtless and boxer-briefs.

In the moment, we were all too terrified to try to sort out what the hell could be going down in the Wallenheimer household on at 9:30 on a Friday night that would have a bunch of young musclebound dudes indecent and ready to savage an entire high-school football team. We sprinted to our cars and sped away, leaving in our wake countless fuming New Hampshiremen.

At the elementary school, it took a few minutes for us to stop giggling before we realized we were down to only six cars. Phil, our starting tight-end and co-captain, was nowhere to be seen. We gave him a few minutes, hoping by some chance he went to the wrong school or stopped at 7-11 or something, then we faced cold reality.

They got him. The Wallenheimers got Phil and the four of our teammates he had in his car, and now someone had to go back and make sure they were OK. For all we knew this could be a Deliverance scenario.

I was the other captain; it was pretty clearly my responsibility. Riding shotgun in my ’94 Nissan Sentra I had my friend Cory, an outside linebacker and one of the stronger and more reliable dudes on the team. He was right for the mission, and up for it too. In the back sat a couple of pothead benchwarmers, awesome guys no doubt, but guys I’m pretty sure only came along that night to collect empty toilet-paper rolls with which to build bongs. But they were too lazy to get out of the car, and too indifferent to danger. So we set off.

When we turned onto the Wallenheimers’ street for the second time that night — lights on this time — we could see Phil’s Grand Cherokee down the block, parked in front of the house with the hazards on.

As I crept toward Phil’s jeep, I noticed that it seemed like the commotion outside the Wallenheimers’ had settled. No one was being brutalized, at least.

But the biggest Wallenheimer of them all stood in the middle of the road. The end-boss Wallenheimer. Bald on top with gray hair creeping around the side, he wore only tighty whiteys. He held a cigarette in one hand and a golf club in the other. His broad shoulders supported the massive gut he wore with no shame at all.

“Oh s@#$,” Cory said. “That must be the dad.”

He spotted the car and started walking slowly in our direction. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and left it there.

Then he started running. All out sprint. And it must have been 30 yards from where he stood to the car but he closed it quick, lifting the golf club above his head as he did. From the backseat, the pothead guys unleashed a classic stoner-guy, Bill-and-Ted-in-the-phone-booth yell.

In perhaps my all-time greatest driving maneuver, I threw the car in reverse and executed a razor-sharp two-point turn, threading the needle between two parked cars — not the type of thing they teach you in driver’s ed and in truth something that necessitates the type of turning radius you really only find on a fine automobile like the 1994 Nissan Sentra. And I did this at high speed, despite the pressure of a giant naked man chasing me with a golf club and with the added distraction of a couple of terrified stoners screaming their lungs out in the backseat.

Of this I am proud. I am not proud of ditching Phil.

We found out at practice the next day that one of the Wallenheimers had reached into his car, grabbed his keys and thrown them into the bushes, and that Phil and the guys in his car had been forced at bat-point to clean up all the toilet paper on the property by a very humorless and scantily clad family.

That was the last time we went toilet-papering that year, incidentally.