And now we come to the weird part, to once more paraphrase Seth Maxwell in "North Dallas Forty."
Now we look ahead to autumn, and we can see what more and more seems unlikely to await us. James Street will not be leading Texas back against Sooey Pig Arkansas in that creaky old stadium in Fayetteville. Johnny Rodgers will not be twisting and turning and breaking free for the Cornhuskers in the big showdown with Greg Pruitt, Jack Mildren and Oklahoma.
There will be no Indiana and Purdue fighting over a battered bucket, no Bo and Woody running it off-tackle 562 times in one afternoon, no Lindsey Nelson moving ahead to further action in the third quarter because Pittsburgh failed to move the ball and punted to Notre Dame.
I cannot fathom an autumn Saturday afternoon without all that. But the dominoes are tipping now, softly, and you can see where this is going, just as surely as we saw it in the early days of March.
That's when the Ivy League canceled its conference basketball tournament in advance of the Bastard Plague, just as it did its football season a few weeks back. And, just as in March, everyone thought the Ivies were being a tad dramatic, instead of being what they really were.
Which was ahead of the curve.
Because now UConn has pulled the plug on its football season and the Missouri Valley Conference has and, yesterday, the Mid-American Conference, the first FBS conference to do so. Everyone's moving to the spring, and pretty soon the Power 5s will also. It's just a matter of time now.
College football will happen again, but it will happen in an alien landscape. Like so much else in these shaken-and-stirred times, it will feel weird and out-of-place, as if someone had set the table for a formal dinner with Chinet and red Solo cups.
That's because, like so many other sports, college football and the fall are a perfect weld, inextricably soldered together in all the senses. The former is as much a part of the latter as shortening days and lengthening nights and September heat slowly relaxing its grip as October comes on, and winter becomes a reality you can see just a ways off.
I hate this, as an old sportswriter. I take no pleasure in seeing what I suspected would happen start to happen, no matter what fools like Danny Kanell tweet about sportswriters taking satisfaction in being able to say "I told you so."
No sportswriter I know wants to see a fall without football, whether or not he or she saw it coming. That's absurd. But then Kanell has never been the sharpest tool in the shed, so I suppose allowances must be made.
No, those of us who spent our Saturday afternoons watching fall come on and Lou's Notre Dame legions take on the University of Navy are going to feel an emptiness that can't be filled, if what seems to be happening happens. Tumbleweeds will blow through our Saturday afternoons, and the only sound will be the banging of shutters in vacant windows.
Perhaps that's a tad dramatic, too. So maybe I'll just tell you what's in my mind's eye right now, as I watch the dominoes start to tumble.
What I see is an October afternoon in Ross-Ade Stadium, Purdue taking on someone. It doesn't really matter who, or what October afternoon. They all look the same to me, whether it's Drew Brees or Jim Everett or Kyle Orton down there throwing the football, and Illinois or Iowa or Ohio State trying to stop them.
You can see all that from the old Robert Woodworth pressbox, and more besides. If you lift your eyes, you can see a vast expanse of trees stretching out beyond the far side of the stadium and the dome of Mackey Arena. They are every color October offers: Reds and yellows and oranges and russet browns, the perfect backdrop to what's happening down on the field.
That's college football to me. They can move it to spring -- the prudent move -- but that backdrop won't be there. And something will go out of it all because of that.
This makes me a sentimental coot, I suppose. But then, Chris Schenkel never rhapsodized about those beautiful Saturday afternoons in the spring.
Only in the fall.
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