Global News

Saturday September 04, 2010

We have an orgy of content for you! see our UConn game roundtable, cfaller’s paean to Cam Gordon, chitownblue’s breakdown of the laughable UConn program, and dex strapping his hands across MICH’s engines once again.

Finally, this was written/posted before I read Orson’s eerily thematically similar (and excellent) post here.

This the sunrise over lake Michigan on September 4th, 2010. It’s sort of an odd time – the sky is dotted with both birds and bats. One group is stretching their wings to start another day. the other getting one last Taco Bell run in before bedtime. 

“What the fuck is your problem?”, you may be wondering, “it’s 5:30 AM.” You’re not wrong.

The dawn brings all sorts of rather obvious metaphors that an optimistic Michigan fan may grasp at to begin a season on the heels of two of the most disappointment in program history. the cylclical nature of life, the rebirth of the program from the darkness, the light struggling and eventually vanquishing the dark – all these are facile, easy, and I’m not going to waste our time at 5:30 AM to bludgeon all of us over the head with it.

What’s notable, I suppose, is that I’m awake. at 5:30. as a Jewish kid, I don’t know what it was like to go to bed on December 24th unable to control your excitement for the bounty of toys you were going to receive the next morning, or what it was like to pester your parents for hours at the crack of dawn asking if now is when you can finally open your presents. Yet, here I am, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and I guess it’s something pretty similar.

Through two years of admirable play and disappointing results, I’m still here with butterflies in my stomach, waiting for a game I’m going to have no hand in deciding. All the assorted crap from the off-season recedes – today there’s football. No articles to parse, grudges to harbor, or op-ed’s against which to take umbrage.

At some point, harsh realities will blunt what’s possible, but right now it’s all Denard  gliding free, Tay Odoms laying the wood to an unsuspecting cornerback, and images of Ryan Van Bergen extending “his series” against Indiana into a full season.

It would be patently wrong to say “there’s nothing like Michigan football” when describing the feeling – I had a son born this year, and comparisons of this sort have a new, much farther, yard-marker to pass. but maybe that’s part of it – today is the first Michigan game of my son’s life, although only one of the two of us is going to remember it.

In a fanbase beholden to tradition more than most, there’s frequently talk of what cosmetic changes are better/worse for the program – the White Knight of the Big House hates expansion, MGoBlog hates piped in music, the whole kerfluffle with Big 10 re-alignment. but thousands of kids this year, somewhere, are watching their first Michigan game with their parents - doubtlessly launching them on a fandom not dissimilar from the one that has me awake at 5:30 AM on a Saturday writing a blog post about Michigan football. And maybe that’s the most import “tradition” we have as Michigan fans.

Right now it’s all endless possibility – and the odds are that at some point this year, whether it’s this week or later on, that possibility will start to have fences and limits constructed around it. No matter what happens, though, this moment will come again next year, and the next (though then, hopefully, minus a screaming infant), and as “what’s possible” for my son, like for Michigan football, slowly gets limited by life, he’ll still have these mornings of endless possibility, even if what prompts them is different.

Today is the dawn of Michigan Football, 2010. Go Blue.