The day before yesterday, the new version of EA’s college football video game was finally made available. Before I made my way to bed, your North Carolina Tar Heels had just beaten the Miami Hurricanes—for the third time in the season—in the College Football Playoff Semifinal thanks in part to a 200-yard explosion by a freshman halfback named Bobby Sourdough (this is the default name given to the created character in the Road to Glory mode. I laughed for five minutes when it appeared on the screen. I would die for my fast adult son Robert Sourdough).
The soundtrack to the game is all drumlines and marching bands, and watching Bobby Bread running out of the tunnel in Kenan Stadium to the customary “TAR! HEELS!” call-and-response triggered a very real emotional response that I didn’t fully expect. From my current seat in my office on the uphill run to the middle of July, football season feels like eons away, and I’m reminded of the way the month of December used to feel as a child. Right after the plates were cleared from Thanksgiving, it was time to settle in for the longest three to four weeks of the year, a month-long thumb-twiddling in the early twilight of the winter months.
Even as time accelerates around us, each year inevitably quicker than the last, there are a few things that still drag on. Like uncertain hours in a waiting room, or breathless days between a first and second date, or the interminable weeks or months before something highly anticipated. Christmas and football season both take their sweet time arriving, then are gone in a flash; one of the cruelties of the way we experience the flow of time.
As five-star freshman Bobby Sourdough took an outside zone run 65 yards to the house, erasing a cornerback with a brutal stiffarm on the way, I got to thinking about how excited I was for actual, real-life college football. Even with the way the sport has changed, even with the offseason chatter around Coach Belichick, even in a time where unprecedented has slid directly into the norm; I can’t wait for the season to start. I will receive the upcoming football season as a gift, wrapped neatly and placed beneath the college sports tree, and I will thank the gift-giver for it when the day finally comes. Sometimes, it’s a brand new video game. Others, it’s a box of socks. There’s no way of knowing until we get to Christmas morning, and no way of knowing how this season will go until toe meets leather.
Either way, it’s a gift.