Maybe it’s the first real heat of the year. Maybe it’s the trailer release for the first college football video game in 11 years. Maybe it’s just the general excitement that always seems to accompany the change of season. Whatever it is, it makes me think about football and I feel like I’m ready to get hurt again.
As we bravely step into a post-Drake Maye world, there are a lot of questions surrounding the show we know and love. Who will be the quarterback? Will there be defense? Will the ACC survive in any recognizable form? I precisely don’t have any of the answers to these or other questions circulating on the forums, water coolers and lazy channels of the Tar Heel Blog.
I don’t hate this, not knowing. It is unusual for me to embrace ignorance; I usually fight like hell against it, overwhelmingly afraid of being discovered as a fraud or an idiot. The thing is, though, no one really knows. There’s a post I wrote about this before, on a dusty shelf somewhere in the Tar Heel Blog’s records department, but the upshot is this: No one completely knows what’s going to happen. In this beautiful, silly, brutal, beloved sport, the great equalizer is the jagged bounce of the strangest ball this side of the wiffle field.
There are people who get paid a lot of money (deserved or undeserved, or sometimes both over the course of a season) to make a more educated guess about all of this than the rest of us. Trainers and analysts in the building are already working on backup contingency plans in an effort to be ready to respond to anything that happens when that family violence breaks out between gangs. They probably have been since the clock hit zero in Duke’s Mayo Bowl in December. Your burden is to worry more specifically about the questions I mentioned above and, ideally, take steps to remedy these concerns before your feet hit leather in a new season.
This ignorance, while probably one of the most stressful parts of an already stressful job, is a welcome release for the casual sports fan or blogger. I don’t need to have any answers; I’m not the one who will be asked the questions when the season is underway. All I can do is wait and hope, and it’s often much easier to lean fully into that hope when you don’t know any better. The pain of last year’s collapse has all but faded into a vague memory, the pain reduced to a dull throb, indistinguishable from seasons before or after.
Despite myself, I get more and more excited. College football is my favorite sport in the world, and just across the chasm of the summer months awaits a new season that promises seismic changes (some welcome, some not so much). I don’t have any answers to the questions that plague many Tar Heel faithful, but I’m hoping someone does. As I sit here in the spring heat, in my blissful light blue ignorance, I can’t wait to find out.
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