Autumn whispers

 Listen close this fine summer morning, and you can hear it coming. Coming on little cleated feet, to cadge from Sandberg.

Football, boys and girls. And here you thought autumn was a ways off yet. 

To be sure it's a mere whisper of a whisper just now, a stir in the breeze under July's fierce sun. But sooner than you think -- so much sooner -- the little cleated feet will be clackety-clacking into our ordered lives again, and then the clackety-clack will become a CLACKETY-CLACK, and pretty soon it will be a CLACKETY-CLACKETY-CLACKETY-CLACK that fills the world.

I know this because ESPN's website is telling me this morning that NFL training camps are officially open.

I know it because the major college football conferences are beginning to roll out their annual preseason media ragers again.

I know it because I dreamed it last night.

Dreamed I was covering a high school football game between a local school (I won't name it, but the team wore orange) and some school I'd never heard of, and the local team's quarterback was throwing touchdown passes and catching touchdown passes, and a bunch of college coaches were there to watch him.

As dreams will do, the details have gone tattery around the edges here in the light of day. So I don't remember who the coaches were, only that they were big-deal guys. I've also lost the quarterback's name. the name of the school the orange team was playing (only that it was weird), or what the final score was (although the orange team won big).

What I do remember is the quarterback looked a little like Arch Manning, only he wasn't Arch Manning. And I remember he threw 54 passes and only completed 21, but four or five were for touchdowns -- including one that seemed to cover half-a-mile in the air before hitting the receiver in stride. Also, Not Arch Manning caught six passes for 72 yards, though I don't remember seeing him do it.

In other words, it was as ridiculous as dreams tend to be.

But it stayed with me long after I awoke, and now I'm thinking about football. About training camps opening up. About all those high school Friday nights -- including the night I got locked in some area school's stadium and had to climb an eight-foot fence to get out. And about our college mercenaries telling a mob of phones and tape recorders about the great season their latest whistle stop will have -- if in fact they can remember which whistle stop it is.

Yeah, we're gonna kick some prime booty here in Columbus this year. Wait, did I say Columbus? I meant Corvallis. Or maybe College Station. One of those "C" places.

Whatever, dude. In any event, I dreamed of football last night, and when I got up this morning it was 53 degrees outside and the windows were open and it felt almost ... kinda-sorta ... a wee bit like autumn. Like a Friday night, or a Saturday afternoon, or a Monday/Thursday/Sunday night.

And I know if I walk into a supermarket in the next few days, I'm going to see pumpkin spice Cheerios or something on the shelves. I know it.