One of the best episodes from one of the most popular series in TV history has a Brunswick connection.

“College,” an episode of the hit HBO series “The Sopranos,” featured Meadow Soprano traveling to Maine with her mobster father, Tony, to visit Bowdoin, Bates and Colby colleges.

TV Guide called the show “the second greatest episode in the history of television.”

James Gandolfini, best known for his role as an anxiety-ridden mob boss on the hit HBO series, died Wednesday while on vacation in Italy. He was 51. His passing sparked fond remembrances of the groundbreaking TV series in which he starred.

Highlights from the Bowdoin episode — which aired during the show’s first season, Feb. 7, 1999 — are detailed in the article, “TV’s Top 100 Episodes of All Time,” in TV Guide’s June 15-28, 2009, issue.

After denying to his daughter that he’s a hit man, Tony Soprano tracks down an enemy, executes him, and then does some soul searching outside the Bowdoin admissions office.

There, he sees an inscription on the wall quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”—

“No man … can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true.”

Noting Tony’s interest in the inscription, a student informs him that Hawthorne was a famous Bowdoin graduate.

Writing in Slate, TV critic Julia Furlan said the “College” episode is ideal “for newbies who want to give the show a one-hour test-run.”

“‘The Sopranos’ gets us to root, at least a little bit, for a ruthless bad guy to win so that his smart daughter can go to an Ivy League school and his wife can make sure there’s an excess of prosciutto in the fridge,” Furlan writes.

The episode was not filmed on the Bowdoin campus. The college portions were filmed in Madison, N.J.

“The Sopranos” aired from January 10, 1999 to June 10, 2007, one of the most successful TV series ever.

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