I missed college a great deal yesterday. I don’t miss it often; the South and I had a doomed relationship, I never found a subject that fired me up, and wearing a jacket and tie to a football game will never, ever make sense to me. Two out of those three could easily be classified as self-inflicted, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m at peace with my dispassion towards much of my college experience. But if there were ever a day to make me long for a time machine, yesterday would be it.
The magnitude of the day revealed itself slowly. I woke up eminently cognizant of the Yankees game at seven o’clock. I also knew the Giants were playing the Raiders at one. Then, as if the sports schedule were a coloring book and these games were the thick black lines, I slowly filled in the vacant spaces. The Angels were playing the Red Sox at noon. The Broncos and Rockies were playing at four and ten, respectively. I realized there would be twelve consecutive hours of meaningful sports, and that’s precisely when I started to miss my closest friends from college. If the year were 2007 instead of 2009, the five of us would have procured our adult beverages of choice, secured some terribly unhealthy provisions, and embedded ourselves in front of our too-large television for a day of witty banter, obnoxious proclamations, and the rare enlightening debate. That’s what I missed and will continue to miss the most about college: those endless, sports-filled Saturdays and Sundays that gave us a great excuse to do nothing but enjoy each other’s company.
On a less nostalgic note, yesterday also provided the faint but exhilarating possibility of the elusive fivefecta (I couldn’t find anything higher than a superfecta, so I made this up.) The fivefecta is the unassisted triple play of sports fandom, albeit less sudden in its occurence. If the Red Sox lost, the Giants won, the Broncos won (at the Patriots’ expense), the Yankees won, and the Rockies won, October 11th, 2009 would have to be considered one of the all-time great days in personal fan history. Naturally, I decided to monitor this situation very closely, only to see it fall short because of the uncharacteristically effective Brad Lidge. And so it goes.
As you can probably guess, the most important game of the day for me was the Yankees-Twins contest. Because it’s October and my doctor says it’s bad for me to be a statistically-inclined curmudgeon all the game, I decided to watch it the way most fans do: with youthful exuberance, relentless optimism, and with the belief in the unlikely. Valiantly, that approach lasted until the bottom of the eighth inning, when a perpetual pet peeve and occasional blog topic reared its ugly head. I simply could not resist the temptation. I regressed into curmudgeonhood, which I why I’m writing this right now. Read the rest of this entry »