And a host of others.
Walking Through That Door:
I've spent all year yelling, apparently into space, that this is your team. They are not great, they are not "familiar" to you, and they make your testicles smaller when they are beaten by teams we used to slaughter.
Tough. Shit.
It's the last game of the season. There is no bowl. There is no scenic trip to some backwater in the south to play for a tire company exhibition game. There will be no Michigan at Christmas, no Michigan during the Festival of Lights, no Michigan during ESPN CapitalOne MasterCard AutoZone Bowl Week presented by IBM. There will be no Michigan on New Year's Eve. There will be no Michigan to nurse your inevitable hangover on the first, and there will be no Michigan while Chris Rose tries to hold together the worst college football TV crew in existence during the biggest games of the year.
There will be Michigan on Saturday. There will be Michigan on the field under the gray November sky in the 'Shoe on ABC while housewives ask their husbands "aren't both these teams usually good?"
There will be Michigan for one more time. One more campaign. One more time this team, a team some of us have grown to love, pulls itself off the canvas and staggers back in against an overwhelming opponent.
I had the misfortune of playing for a terrible team during my football career. And I will always remember walking out for the last game of our tenure, still looking for that elusive "victory" that I'd heard other people whisper about. We had yet to confirm the existence of "winning", but it seemed like a plausible phenomena. Apparently if you score more points at the end of the game, this is what the coaches said anyway, you get to feel "good" instead of throwing your helmet into the bus window and silently swearing to yourself the whole ride home.
Of course, we lost our final game. We gave up a touchdown on, of all things, a fucking hook and lateral that we had seen on video a hundred times in the week before. This was the ultimate difference. And instead of grasping that "victory", we spent our last night in uniform throwing helmets at inanimate objects and hurting.
I say this because many seniors on our team will never see the field again. And those that do may not see it in the same meaningful way they do now. These players, whether you feel good about their performance or not, have given everything for your enjoyment this year. More importantly, they've given everything they had for each other.
It's likely, extremely likely, that these seniors will leave with another loss to Ohio State. So those of you who are disappointed, those who find the performance "unacceptable", those who launch mis-guided, pretentious, faux-literary, never bothered to lace up a cleat in your life, whiny, overly-romantic, over-rated diatribes about the present not being the same as the past; you can all feel free to watch something else. Maybe you can put in your 100th game DVD and masturbate through the tears until you feel good again. You don't need to share in John Thompson's melancholy, pretend to care about Dough Dutch's future while lamenting his past, or wonder if KC Lopata can get a job in AFL2. You don't deserve to watch the last hurrah of Jamison and Taylor. And you certainly don't deserve to hope for one last shot of Morgan Trent's mom.
For the rest of us - it's time to get up. Get your ass off the mat, wipe the blood out of your eyes, pop your shoulder back into place, and go out to get hit in the mouth once again. There's no shame in getting your ass kicked. Only in letting your ass get kicked.
It's Ohio State week. Fuck them.
