The Rose Bowls of the Mind

Happy Sunday to all the assembled. Please open your hymn books to page 152 for our reading from Mr. A. Bartlett Giamatti, onetime baseball commissioner and Yale president.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight."

And with that, we end the regular season of this year's college football season. Many games remain! Good lord, there are too many bowl games. But the season proper is over and done. The way that we assembled degenerates and weirdos mark the time from late August to December is through, or at least approaching that way. There are bowl games for the lucky, conference championships for the special, playoffs for the exalted. But for the vast squalid rest, the season as a scheduled thing is finished. The rhythm of the calendar that we have come to know, MACtion and Sun Belt midweek, those random and arbitrary cash grabs on Friday nights, the regularized Saturday timeslots, the late-night West Coast games: for now, it's done. We must bear winter alone (thank god we don't approach it like Illinois-Northwestern or Minnesota-Wisconsin last night. I don't have the stamina to deal with that kind of snow anymore.)

The shift is bittersweet. It's hard to face alone.

Some fanbases are begging for the end of the season (looking at you, Purdue.) Some are muddling along, unsure of what comes next (Maryland and Michigan State, hi!). There are deep patterns at play each autumn; hope springs eternal, no matter the fan base. The rivalries must be revisited, but they are reconvened regardless. Some are big and important and expectant with relevance. Some are small and regional and unimportant to the powers that be. But they're the way that we track the time, count the stations, mark the seasons. They set the order to the day and the week; they establish the traditions and expectations that we operate through, for better or for worse.

Hope springs eternal. And for nearly every team and for every season, it's designed to break your heart. It's the game we have chosen. That we assembled few do it together, despite disparate fanbases, ages, locations, hobbies, lives, remains an astoundingly special thing.

This is a lengthy and whiskey-fueled way to get to the point, but for the four of you still reading: thank you. Thank you for counting the stations, marking the time, tracking the seasons, and most importantly, for being kind to one another regardless of name or creed or fanbase (yes, even Iowa fans).

We'll keep doing our best to set our little part of the order of the day and the week here at OTR. The seasons will continue. We advance towards proper basketball time (and BoilerUp89 would argue that we already fully there).

The ways in which we pass the seconds and count the seasons are based around sports; for better or worse, we count them together. We hope you'll count them here with us.