"All the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recognizable I, but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is..."
"The chance and probability of meddling interference arising out of the disapprobation of all communities of men toward any situation which they do not understand."
The season is here. Everything, including inertia itself, gives way to the unimpeded galloping of unceasing action, of touchdowns and interceptions and fortunes misfortunes and so on. Of everything, really. Once it all begins you can't stop it even though sometimes you would like to.
I have been counting down the days, minutes, seconds since the last second ticked off the clock against Ohio State and the scarlet masses, offensively prominent in the melange of blue and maize and neutral, drowning out everything, even the lugubrious Victors, rendered solemn and pathetic, a painful chorus of we tried but it wasn't enough and let us play to that, let us play something one more time because it's all that's left. Ever since that point in time, I have had my eye on UCONN, on September 4th, and if was certainly a struggle to get here. Six months ago UCONN was just a vague shadowy entity on the horizon, a foe that was known but not well-known, and one whose threat to our way of life was not imminent. Now, on September 3rd, they are real. Ordinarily, talking about UCONN is such apocalyptic terms would be absurd, and yet these times are not ordinary. We've seen our share of times this offseason; there's no reason to recount them here. They're well-documented (unfortunately).
In the doldrums of summer, the whittling away of rumors from fact to retain some semblance of involvement, as any good fan (atic) ought to do, I started this humble blog. When I began, I was bothered that I didn't know what I was doing, really. I didn't know if it was worth doing or if there was a point, sort of like pretending to play defense on 3rd and 26, offering up a hopeless pretence of some future success. To be honest, I still don't know what I'm doing. I'm still trying to figure it out.
"You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing."
And that's okay; we all are, to an extent. The fact that anybody at all has noticed this is encouraging, as opposed to my previous over/under of approximately zero attention whatsoever. So, that's nice. I figure that so long as people notice that you're trying to do good, that's good enough. This will be my first time writing during a real, live football season, and I'm sure that I will grow and adjust accordingly, just like the boys on the field. I don't know if I'm ready, I don't know if they're ready; we'll find out soon enough.
"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable..."
Whether I believe we will win or lose tomorrow or any other day is irrelevant*. There are a few things that I do know, though, that are particularly important to us all and always will be.
"What is probably the most moving mass-sight of all human mass-experience, far more so than the spectacle of so many virgins going to be sacrificed to some heathen Principle, some Priapus--the sight of young men, the light quick bones, the bright gallant deluded blood and flesh dressed in a martial glitter of brass and plumes, marching away to a battle."
The colors and sounds and sights, the primal evocations of our anatomy, will all still be there, beckoning to pay attention the the story itself because the aforementioned is assumed and omnipresent. We all came in, bragging about our tattoos, flaunting our brash and insolent right to victory. We were met with resistance, wounded, and those wounds have become scars, a visual testament to that resistance, and even more importantly, that lack of foresight. The scars have healed, and we are back to finish what we started.
"Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool..."
Maybe.
Nothing more and nothing less; we now sit in the Purgatory of The Night Before, the weightless stretch of Maybe. Tomorrow, we will exit that Maybe-land, emerging into the definite world of yes and no. As horrible as the offseason is, as devoid of football and actions and answers as it is, I bid it a nostalgic adieu. No longer can we have the time to wait and see and give ourselves a second to breathe and consider what has just happened and what is about to happen. The time for that is over. Now is the time to go and worry about the result of the going later. In short...Go Blue.
*38-21, Michigan...FWIW.
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