On Friday night, kids across the city of Louisville will line the streets and celebrate what is widely acknowledged as the zenith of autumn.
Less than 24 hours later, on the first day of November, the Louisville football team will play a game at Virginia Tech that matters on every conceptual level.
In the midst of the riot that is the last week of October, I think it’s important that we all take a few minutes to pause and appreciate the sublimity of our current situation.
With college football in particular,
I’m always blown away — and a little depressed — by the modern disparity in time spent dreaming about what may come versus time spent actually living the reality of those dreams.
The season is short. Just three months of continuous play before the start, stop world of conference championships and bowl games and the College Football Playoff begins to steer the ship.
Diehard college football fans spend, at a minimum, 70 percent of their calendar year thinking about what might happen in the fall. With the sport’s cruel and unforgiving setup, it takes just a couple of September weeks for some of these fans to be launched straight back into the world coaching changes, roster assembly, and what could happen 11 months down the line.
From the first days of the new year through the spring and especially through the summer, fans in Baton Rouge and University Park and Gainesville spent countless hours fantasizing about what the month of November might have in store for them. Those same fans are now spending Halloween week debating with each other about who the right man is to come in and take over their respective programs and make this spring and summer’s daydreams closer to autumn realities.
Our minds are elsewhere in the Derby City.
The Louisville football team will enter the month of November with a 6-1 record and a signature road victory over then-No. 2 Miami on its resume. The 16th-ranked Cardinals have five winnable games staring them directly in the face. Win those, and the summer visions of conference championship game and College Football Playoff appearances begin to take actual form.
We have played two full months of football, and every best-case-scenario discussion piece from the seemingly endless offseason is still out there for the taking. That’s pretty special, and the most foolish thing any rational human being can do is take something special for granted.
The time of “fake fall” in the Ohio Valley is behind us. The chill in the air is now here to stay for the long haul. With the added punch of the November morning air comes a heightened intensity once the weekend arrives.
If you’re fortunate to make it this far with all your dreams in tact, every chilly snap seems to carry the weight of 15 of the ones you watched while sweating through your t-shirt in the second week of September. Don’t rise to the moment, and those dreams are gone just as fast as the red and the rich gold of the leaves that are currently on display.
How you got here matters little. Some might argue that it doesn’t matter at all.
What matters most is what you do next. The triumphs of September and October can be vanquished just as quickly as winter will eventually wipe out the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Or, those triumphs can be accentuated.
Louisville hasn’t been perfect this season. Far from it. There have been seemingly endless complaints about the running game, the offensive line, the quarterback, the play calling, and an overtime loss to Virginia that still boggles the mind weeks later. All of those complaints are valid. None of those complaints should overshadow the joy of the moment at hand.
There are just 21 out of 136 FBS teams that will enter the month of November with one or zero losses. There are a handful of two loss teams that still harbor legitimate shots at making the College Football Playoff. For everyone else, the season has been reduced to a chance to play spoiler, or to beat a rival, or to create momentum for next season, or to maybe play in a bowl game that will serve as background noise at a holiday party in late December. Every day that you can count yourself as a member of the former group and not the latter is a day that should be celebrated.
Our “sports lives” and our real lives intersect in so many different ways. With both, one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is this: If we aren’t recognizing and appreciating and basking in the good times, then what the hell is the point?
At the college level, playing meaningful football in November isn’t an inherent right. It’s an earned privilege. The joy of being able to turn the page from Halloween and know that the Cardinals are going to play a game that will both illicit a wide range of emotions and have a direct impact on the sport at the highest possible level is not a joy that should be taken for granted.
The march towards meaningful post-Thanksgiving football begins Saturday.
