Welcome fall

Touch of cool to the air this morning, after so much smothery heat. The humidity was gone, cleaned out. August finally let the arm go, after twisting it behind our backs for days like the summer bully it is.

I guess we can call that "timing."

Timing, because a touch of cool is exactly the herald for what begins tonight, when college football steps back onto the stage in full force. There are games tonight and games tomorrow night and games all day Saturday and even games Sunday and Monday, and that is a glorious thing. That is indeed a glorious thing.

Faithful Blobophiles ("Quit saying that! You just sound delusional!" both of you are saying) know college football is the Blob's favorite thing, or at least one of them. You can keep your Sundays and Sunday nights and Monday nights, for the most part, in the Blob's universe. It is too corporate and too obsessed with image and brand, to the extent that fines are routinely meted out for jaywalking crimes such as wearing the wrong-colored socks or some such thing. It is football winnowed down to numbing lockstep, with a season that stretches colorlessly across endless months.

You can have it, in other words.

But Saturday afternoons?

Those are mine.

I love those shortening fall afternoons, and the chill of the evenings that follow. I will readily acknowledge that college football on the highest level has become a largely corporate enterprise, too, with all the corruption that comes with that. All you'll need to remind yourself of that is catch a glimpse of Urban Meyer stalking the sidelines in Columbus, Ohio, sometime this fall, when he should be stalking the unemployment line.

But I love it still. In my sportswriting days I loved the morning of a big game in, say, South Bend, where I always arrived two or three hours before kickoff just so I could stroll that postcard campus and feel everything build slowly toward kickoff. I loved the homey feel of Bishop John M. D'Arcy Stadium -- watching the geese do their game-day flyover before touching down in Mirror Lake, then watching the Saint Francis Cougars stomp the life out of some poor McKendree or Olivet Nazarene.

I loved settling into the pressbox in Ross-Ade Stadium, waiting for that goofy little train to come chugging along, waiting for public-address announcer Jim Russell's weekly reminder that the Robert C. Woodworth Memorial Pressbox was a working pressbox, so no damn cheering.

(Although Jim always was much more cordial about it).

Mostly I loved the drive home from Notre Dame or Purdue or Michigan late at night, the column filed, the pressure off, some other college game muttering softly from the radio. Here was the Iowa game on a station out of Des Moines, riding some strange atmospheric eddy all the way to Indiana. Then that would be fade out, and here came a MAC game or an SEC game or an ACC game. One night, another of those strange eddies brought in the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats vs. someone, riding shotgun with me all the way from Daytona Beach, Fla.

Best hour or two of my week, those Saturday night drives.

And now it all begins again.

Can't wait for Saturday night, Michigan and Notre Dame filling up my living room with all that swaggering lore. Can't wait for Auburn vs. Washington. Can't wait for all of it, starting tonight up in Angola, where Trine and my employer, Manchester University, renew their own fine rivalry.

The beauty of it, of course, is that no one on either team will want to kick the other's hindparts less than all those Wolverines and Fighting Irish will Saturday night, 80 miles to the west. They are worlds apart in size and scope, and yet it is the same world. It is the same game, the same passion, the same sound going up to the sky.

Glorious. Just damn glorious.