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Is it just us? Are we the only ones who are a little in love with Adam Goldberg? We can't possibly be the only ones harboring naughty fantasies of being on the receiving end of that inimitable glower, just before it breaks into a grin. Can we? Oh, we can? Hey, that's cool. More for us.

This commentator's Goldberg love dates back to Dazed and Confused. In a movie revolving around the biggest high-school party of the year, Goldberg joins forces with Marissa Ribisi and Anthony Rapp to play the socially retarded senior nerds who've barely been to any high-school parties and spend most of the movie psyching themselves up to get to this party at all. I felt a kinship with Goldberg because, like Ribisi's character, I was that nerd hag in high school and university -- the only girl in the crowd of geeky boys, reminding them to make sure the car had gas in it and to use the bathroom before we got on the highway. (Plus, Goldberg -- even in period costume and wig -- reminded me of my unrequited college crush. But I digress.)

Post-D&C, Goldberg hasn't exactly displayed a chameleonic range as an actor: he pretty much always plays a cranky, neurotic, fast-talking, self-deprecating character, his actorly choices amounting to his ever so slightly modulating the levels of crank, neurosis, speed of speech, and self-deprecation. His role as Chandler's roommate Eddie on Friends -- though it marked his first outing as a Gen-X sidekick -- was, we felt, kind of a rip-off for the viewer; we only had one episode in which we saw him enjoying Chandler's jokes and denigrating Baywatch before he turned psycho: watching Chandler while he slept, accusing Chandler of sleeping with his ex-girlfriend, and "forgetting" that Chandler had asked him to move out. While we love Joey now, and wouldn't have wanted him to live on his own forever, it would have been nice to enjoy Eddie's "See ya, pals" a little longer before he became a plot contrivance keeping non-sexual boyfriends Chandler and Joey apart.

His camp securely pitched on Sidekick Beach, Goldberg moved on to play yet another protagonist's less conventionally attractive roommate on Relativity, the short-lived ABC drama. At the time, the entertainment press wanted us to agree that David Conrad, the show's male lead, was going to be the breakout star...but where is David Conrad now? No, Adam Goldberg was (as far as we were concerned, anyway) the show's real star, and still owns the title of Hottest, Gloweringest, Likeliest Unlikely Sex Symbol From a Prematurely Cancelled ABC Drama, despite Jeremy Piven's post-Cupid attempts to usurp him.

Though he does the occasional turn as Jew of Yesteryear (in movies like Saving Private Ryan and A Beautiful Mind), Goldberg is still at his most Goldbergian playing prickly contemporary characters -- jerky traders (The $treet), jerky lawyers (Will and Grace), speed freaks (The Salton Sea), and oh, lord, the sidekicks, in forgettable crap like EdTV and the upcoming How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. But for we few, we happy few, we band of Goldberg lovers, there is hope that his breakout star vehicle may imminently be upon us: the IMDb says he will star in a new TV series this year: Flashpoint, subtitled "E.I.S.: Epidemiologic Intelligence Service." Oooooh. That sounds cool. Think of the ripped-from-the-headlines plot possibilities! It could be the next C.S.I.! And then we'd see so much more of Goldberg -- on talk shows and magazine covers -- and then it could goose his movie career, too, and then Matthew McConaughey could play his Gen-X sidekick for a change!

We know it's not likely, but please don't shatter our illusions. Just let us love our Goldberg.