Welcome back

 Outlined against a blue-gray Gaelic sky, or something like that, the Rambling Wreck rode again. That is not how Grantland Rice wrote it, back in 1924. But it's 2024 now, so Granny will have to get used to the alteration in his purplish prose.

Over in Dublin, Ireland, see, No. 10 Florida State and Georgia Tech launched the college football season Saturday, and it was only perfect. Tech jumped up and beat the Seminoles, 24-21, its first win over a top-10 team in nine years. A kid named Haynes King drove the 'Noles crazy, passing for 146 yards and legging it for 54 more. Another kid named Jamal Haynes ran for 75 yards and two touchdowns. That was two Hayneses too many for the 'Noles, who lumped up Tech 41-16 in their last meeting two autumns ago.

Well, not yesterday, boys and girls.

Yesterday, Tech tossed the 'Noles around up front, grinding out 190 rushing yards at 5.3 yards per clip. This especially might have been pleasing to watch for all those ACC fans who had to listen to State whine obsessively last season that it was too good for the ACC, and how the ACC held the Seminoles back because, even though they romped unbeaten through their 2023 schedule, they got passed over for the College Football Playoff by Alabama, a member in good standing of the ACC.

Well, take that, Florida Snooty U. 

But you know the best part about yesterday?

The best part is the game came down to a walk-off 44-yard field goal. And the guy who kicked it, the hero of the hour in Dublin and back home in Atlanta, was named Aidan Birr.

Aidan. Fine old Irish name, that.

It was, again, only perfect, and the sort of wonderfulness that reminded us once more why college football is yea better than the gray monolith that is the National Football League. The scholars have it all over the pros when it comes to lore and tradition and ghosts in leather helmets gamboling across decades of blazing Octobers every time the old alma mater laces 'em up. 

Now, it's true Power Five football (Or is it four now? Three?) is every bit as corporate and money-grubbing these days as the National Fiduciary League, what with the players and their NIL dough and the coaches with their eight-figure salaries, and the mega-conferences with their billions-with-a-B television deals. All that does is make it hard to tell Saturdays and Sundays apart anymore, unless you're watching the Ivies or some other quaint throwback that still plays actual scholars.

But.

But then a day like Saturday comes along, and you wonder if some celestial hand was at work in a way you never do when the Jaguars take on the Titans. You knock off a top-10 team for the first time in a decade, and it's a guy named Aidan who wins it for you? In Dublin?

They don't write scripts like in the corporeal world. Not even Granny would have believed it.

But you know who would, without a doubt?

John Heisman.

The guy for whom they named the Heisman trophy. Also the guy who coached football at Georgia Tech for 18 years, and who won a national title there in 1917, and who also coached baseball and basketball and was the school's athletic director.

Somewhere in the great beyond, you know he's still cheering today. And saying what college football fans everywhere were saying yesterday.

Welcome back, gentlemen. Welcome back.