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No one was more excited about the New Kids on the Block reunion tour than we were until about five minutes ago. You see, we missed the concert when we were young (we were too poor to go, it was very traumatic) and we were obsessed — obsessed! — with NKOTB. We had NKOTB clothes, sheets, and a board game if we remember correctly. We even had a poster of Joey McIntyre over our bed. We wrote "I heart Emily" on his orange t-shirt and would kiss him every night before we went to sleep (when we met Joey in 2001 and told him that story he looked really, really scared).

Fast forward to nowadays — we need to be completely honest here — we still have a NKOTB wall phone even though we don't even have a land line. It's for show, for irony, if you will. And that's kind-of what we thought the NKOTB reunion would be about. We were looking forward to an updated Hangin' Tough and maybe even a grown-up version of Step-By-Step ("step six/you can suck my dick"), but no, Jordan, Jon, Joey, Donnie and Danny are for real.

From nkotb.com:

And this time, it’s the boys – make that, the men – in the group who are in charge.

“We took the initiative instead of going out and asking for help from a label or anyone,” McIntyre explains. “We just started recording because we wanted to and because we were ready. We started doing this from the ground up –just us.”

The brand new New Kids album was really sparked when Wahlberg was in New York for a costume fitting for the upcoming film Righteous Kill that finds him living out another life-long dream by acting in a film alongside two of his greatest heroes, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino as well as 50 Cent. Finding himself around the block, Wahlberg visited the office of his longtime music lawyer who handed him a demo tape of a young singer-songwriter name Nazeree. Since the days of New Kids — and his time producing hits in the early Nineties for his brother Mark as Markey Mark and The Funky Bunch – Wahlberg has been handed a mountain of demos in his time and he took the offering with absolutely no expectations.

Putting the CD on while driving a few days later, Wahlberg heard two songs that spoke to him powerfully. “I got in the car in Boston on my birthday and I popped it in,” he recalls. “ The first song was called `Click, Click, Click’ and from the minute it started, it just grabbed me. I kept waiting for this kid to falter, but he never did. Not only that – I immediately recognized that Joey McIntryre is going to love this record, Jordan Knight is going to love this record and I love this record. The music speaks to all of our sensibilities, but they’re all totally different. It was hip-hop and honest enough for me. It was soulful enough for Jordan and pop and unselfish enough for Joe. It just had it all. I spent the next few hours driving up to girls at red lights and playing them the song. They said, `Is that your song? I said `Not yet.’”

After years of blocking any reunion, Wahlberg was suddenly energized and drove to Jordan Knight’s house that night and played him the songs, “I told him. `Jordan, this could be the moment right here.’ Jordan heard `Click, Click, Click’ and he loved it. Then I emailed them to Joe and the same reaction — and more importantly his wife cried. So I pulled out my checkbook and we started going.”

What had started was more like a mission than a comeback. [Have a listen to that mission here.]

Oh, fine, Donnie. As long as you guys still do The Right Stuff on this "mission," we'll have our thumbs in the belt loops of our jeans dancing right along with you in Atlantic City this September.