OK, so I've been a bit lax in posting to the old blog lately. It's only been three and a half months. And it's certainly no coincidence that I've been silent since August 16. I've been busy! Consumed. As a matter of fact if you were to study my behavior (please don't) since about the age of eight I believe you'd observe a strikingly predictable trend. Between the middle of August and the middle of January every year I've been in the arms, or the clutches of a passionate mistress, football.
I don't apologize for it though I've felt pangs of guilt on a great number of occasions. I'm in love and have been for a long long time. I can't escape it or rather wouldn't try to if I could. It's all consuming. I wouldn't begin to try to explain it to those of you who don't already understand it. And there is no need to do so to the rest of you. I'm crazy mad coo coo for cocoa puffs for both professional and college football. Do I love it more than my wife and children? Of course not but it's been with me a lot longer.
When I was a boy I had dalliances with others. Basketball lost me when the players started signing shoe contracts at 7 and assembling their posses before they could drive. Baseball has its nostalgic charm but it's like your favorite aunt; quaint but nothing to stir the blood. Soccer, er...football? With apologies to my friend Steve who in his eloquent style compares and contrasts the two footballs by their spatial qualities...Call me an American apologist but soccerfootball just ain't football a'tall. Hockey? Please. I'm from freaking Florida. Now I can and will sit down in front of the tube or in an arena or stadium and take one of these others but would I change my plans to do so? As B.B. would say, the thrill (if there ever was one) is gone.
We've reached that part of the autumnal ritual, as predictable as the turning of the leaves, wherein the college game crescendos through rivalry weekend. This past weekend. Many of the titanic tilts throughout time were renewed again. The Game. The Big Game. The Iron Bowl. Michigan-Ohio State. Florida-Florida State. The Egg Bowl (my personal favorite name) And on and on. To not personally be attached to a school with a hated rival is to miss out on one of the great experiences of college life that fortunately or unfortunately carries on in perpetuity. When your team wins, as mine did yesterday, it makes the next 364 days of the year infinitely better.
Unfortunately, yet somehow ingeniously, the college game has managed to mangle the remainder of the season by allowing a collection of bowl representatives in loud sport coats to manage the process of picking its National Champion. If you wonder how that could be ingenious just listen to fans like me argue, moan, and cry about the process thereby stoking the fires and strengthening the collective brand. Ingenious.
Just after the New Year after the collegiate champion is mythically crowned the professionals take to the assorted frozen tundra and plastic grass to settle their championship the right way: On the field. And then, as Hamlet would say, the rest is silence. After the Super Bowl, unless your team wins it, you're left with seven months of waiting, wondering, and wishing that somehow next season was already here.
