A brief pause for rightness

Once again this afternoon they'll play one of the only college football games worth playing, and they'll play it in an utterly appropriate place. And, at last, 2020 will let us off the mat.

At last it will behave like a year that was brung up right, and not like some snorting pig that never learned table manners or any of the other social graces. At last it will act, you know, semi-normal.

You see, today is the Army-Navy game.

And for the first time since 1943, they're playing it at West Point, in a venue (Michie Stadium) named for Army's first football coach, who died in the Spanish-American War.

And if there isn't some sense of rightness to that -- something sane and clean in a year of madness and pestilence -- then perhaps I'm being melodramatic again. All I know is, for three hours, we'll be reminded of what America used to be before crazy people tried to tear it apart because things didn't go their way.

But they won't be doing that today. Not today.

Today, the Corps marches fog-gray into Michie, and the white-capped Brigade marches in, and the Black Knights and Midshipmen will commence having at it on the football field.  Actual students will block and tackle and claw at each other, and if none of it will look exactly the way it does at Clemson Football Inc. or Ohio State Football Inc., no one watching will miss the difference.

Or at least I won't.

The Blob, see, makes Army-Navy appointment viewing every year, and as much I love college football I can't say that about any other game. That's because I'm a history nerd of the first water, and something of a gooey sentimentalist because of that. And so I watch Army-Navy because Dwight Eisenhower once played in this game, and because Omar Bradley did, and because Bull Halsey did. 

I watch it because, sometime soon, those playing in it are going to be defending the nation, and sometimes dying in the process. And somehow that seems a tad more important than watching a bunch of Buckeyes or Clemson Tigers who, sometime soon, will be signing chunky NFL contracts.

So it will be the Corps and the Brigade and Michie for me today, and a football game that dates all the way back to 1890. 

Benjamin Harrison was President of the United States, the day of that first meeting. Sitting Bull was a little more than two weeks away from an assassin's bullet. Teddy Roosevelt was 32 years old, eight years away from San Juan Hill and 11 from the Presidency; Jefferson Davis had been dead less than a year; Douglas MacArthur was a 10-year-old schoolboy already dreaming of military glory.

Before the decade was out, he would be at West Point himself. And the last time Army and Navy played football there, he was in New Guinea, overseeing the grinding campaign to expel the Japanese from their key base at Rabaul.

Now MacArthur's been dead for 56 years, and the Army-Navy game is back in Michie Stadium.

Rightness. Yeah. That's the word.