Shake down the echoes

And, yes, before I am bludgeoned with Domer ridicule: I know that's not how it goes.

It's wake up the echoes. It's shake down the thunder. And all that raise a volley cheer on high business.

I mixed it up because in the coming fall, there's a good chance, at Notre Dame and elsewhere, that echoes will be the only thing shakin' down. And there won't be any Volley Cheers being raised, on high or otherwise.

College football may return, but College Football may not return with it. Which is to say, teams will figure out a safe way to conduct their Saturday business, but there won't be anyone in the stadiums to watch. And half of why college football is college football will therefore be missing.

The topic came up yesterday on one of ESPN's radio platforms, and Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh came down on it this way: Hell, yes, play the games in an empty Big House. This was hardly a surprise; there isn't a football coach in America who wouldn't opt to play games in empty stadiums or vacant lots or on the rings of Saturn if the alternative was not playing. So Harbaugh was simply obeying his DNA with his answer.

And yet ...

And yet, I hear all this, and it's not 2020 anymore. It's 1995 or 2000 or 2010 or some other year in the Before Time.

It's a gameday morning in the parking lots outside Notre Dame Stadium, and I am annoyed. I'm annoyed because the designated media parking has been plunked down in the middle of the tailgating area, and there are people and stuff everywhere.

There are tables laden with food right where I'm trying to reach my space. There are people playing cornhole, too. And there are dozens -- dozens -- of other people who are simply ambling along right in front of my car, as if they haven't considered the possibility that the person driving it might be, you know, a homicidal maniac.

Awful joke among those of us who had to negotiate all that on game days: If we accidentally ran over some Domer's foot, could we paint a tiny leprechaun on our car the way fighter pilots in World War II used to paint swastikas or rising suns on their fuselages?

And, yeah, OK, that's sick. But then sportswriter humor has never been known for its good taste.

The point is, without all those tailgaters and amblers, a lot of what makes a college football game day special would be gone. Half of my ritual at N.D., once I parked, was to drop off my gear in the pressbox and then go for a stroll around campus. Because there's simply nothing in sports like a game-day morning there or in any number of other places.

College football is about the football, yes, but it's also about the tailgating, and old alums reminiscing, and the bands and the student sections and the pageantry. Would football Saturdays at Ole Miss be the same without the ritual party scene in the Grove? Would they be the same at Notre Dame without the players' game-day walk through the fans to the stadium?
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I don't know. Maybe Harbaugh's right, and it would be better to play in a vacuum than not to play at all. But you know what one of my fondest memories is of many epic Michigan-Notre Dame clashes?

No, not Rocket Ismail or Desmond Howard or Reggie Ho or anyone else's on-field heroics.

It's the unearthly roar in the Big House when someone in a yellowjacket-striped helmet does something wondrous. It's the Notre Dame student section singing along with "Hail to the Victors" -- only with a few, um, changes to the lyrics.

College football without all that will just be football. It'll be shakin' down echoes and hitting mute on the thunder. It'll be the sounds of silence, instead of a volley cheer.

The rings of Saturn sound positively hospitable, suddenly.