The fall of summer

 College football was back on my TV yesterday, and it made me want to pull on a sweatshirt and light a fire in the fireplace. Fill my mug with some good hard cider. Look outside, wistfully, for the first hints of brown and orange in the trees.

Autumn came crashing in, in other words. The calendar be damned. 

Outside it was still August and green and summer hanging on by its fingernails, but inside it looked and smelled and sounded like fall. The Nebraska Cornhuskers were choking big-time, same as ever. The Northwestern Wildcats were pulling off the old college try. They were coming to us from a foreign shore -- Ireland -- but even from an ocean away, in the land of hurling and rugby and footie, it was still American college football. A stranger in a strange land, yet wholly familiar.

I have always been a sap for the college game, even as what has happened to it in the new millennium conflicts me terribly. It is College Football Inc. now, a corporate enterprise little distinguishable from the NFL in its structure and function. The realist in me understands it has always been thus to some extent; the gooey sentimentalist wants to believe it's still Archie Manning and Sonny Sixkiller and all those magic names, doing all those magic things on a sun-bronzed Saturday afternoon.

So, I watch, still. I let it pull me in, trademarked to a fare-thee-well though it is these days. I watch Scott Frost call for an onside kick with Nebraska up 28-17 and think, along with all of Husker Nation, "What is he doing?" I watch Northwestern line up and blow the Cornhuskers off the ball as the clock winds down, grinding out the W between the tackles as if channeling the Woody Hayes Buckeyes or Bo Schembechler Wolverines.

Three yards and a cloud of begorra. Or something like that.

It was the climax of a day that began with a morning walk, and during it I could almost feel summer coming down to the final swallows. It's not definable by any means, but it's there. The quality of the light seems different, here in the last of August. The air smells different. There's a hint of coolness to it, even in the sun, that wasn't there in the furnace of July.

Then I came back home, and turned on the TV, and there was college football again.

I almost cracked open an Octoberfest Sammy to celebrate. But that would have been pushing it.

There is a protocol to these matters, after all. Even now.