I drink a couple of bottles of Diet Pepsi — Diet Coke when necessary — a day, but when I was growing up, pop — as we called it — was a fairly rare thing for us.

Maybe that’s why the memories associated with it — the taste, the smell but also the look of the bottles and various Pepsi accoutrements — are so memorable.

We ate dinner tonight at a local restaurant with lots of nostalgic decorations, the kind of place that Moe from “The Simpsons” described as “a place with a whole lot of crazy crap on the walls.”

Among the nostalgic decor was something I’d never seen before: Metal Pepsi bottle carriers.

I don’t have any memory of those and I wonder if they had even been available around here.

I do have vivid memories of the thick paper cartons that six glass bottles of Pepsi, Mountain Dew and other drinks came in. We would get a six-bottle carton of Pepsi on a trip to the grocery store and, a week or so later when we made our next shopping trip, we would buy another.

A big part of that return visit, of course, was returning the empty glass bottles for deposit.

We would save the bottles as they were emptied over the course of a week — remarkable that they lasted that long, but we drank things like milk and water more than pop in those days — and return them to the store in the paper carton. We would show the carton full of bottles at the supermarket office and get the deposit back — a nickel or quarter or whatever it was for the six pack.

I also have vivid memories of the liners of the Pepsi bottle caps. For much of the time that I remember, the bottle cap liners were made of plastic and, at least some of the time, the caps were imprinted with pictures of American presidents. You could collect all the presidents and paste them on some sort of official game card and then … well, I have no idea. I don’t remember ever collecting all the presidents, even though there were only about 17 chief executives to that point.

Kidding.

Before the plastic liners, which the Interwebs tells me were introduced in the 1960s, were cork bottle cap liners. I can’t remember if Pepsi ever conducted games with the cork liners, although I do remember digging them out of the bottle caps for some reason. I remember that because of how easily they fell apart.

I know soft drink companies still do the occasional bottle cap game. But it’s hard to imagine kids today laboring over fragile cap liners, carefully pulling them out of the caps and collecting them for some unimaginable prize.