What topic would you choose if you had the luxury of writing forever? In this article, John Thelin provides his response: He would opt to write about the history of higher education in a way that relies on quantitative data. "Numbers, please!" is his research request in taking on a longitudinal study of colleges and universities over time. His aim is to write using statistics with a difference. Instead of emphasizing the heroic and sophisticated techniques of contemporary statistical analysis, he wants to subject the statistical data to the lens of historical context. Herein he explains the reasoning behind his response. (Contains 9 footnotes.)