Saturday's comin'

 Last quarter of July now, and summer owns the room. Here in the Midwest it's all dryer-vent heat and rainforest humidity, lawns turning to shredded wheat beneath a merciless sun that slows the pace of life to a torpid crawl.

Except.

Except yesterday on some sports channel they were talking college football, and up in Chicago a bunch of Big Ten coaches were talking football, and Saturday Afternoon felt no more than a half-mile off, suddenly. You know what I'm talking about: That moment when it's the weekend and blowtorch July is just a sweat-blurred memory, and you turn on your TV and there is Tennessee at Auburn or Ohio State at Illinois or Michigan at Minnesota.

Here's the alma mater, dear old Ball State, taking on those misbegotten derelicts from Central Michigan. Here are Yale at Dartmouth and Princeton at Penn. Here are Oklahoma at Baylor, Cal at USC, Colgate at Lehigh.

Saturday's comin'. And by "Saturday," I mean those September/October days when the sky is so blue it hurts your eyes, and it's Arkansas vs. Texas in the noon game, and Notre Dame hosting Michigan State or Navy or North Carolina in the 3:30 game.

Saturday's comin'. The more I watched, the more July slipped away, and I realized with a jolt that even though the pool still beckons and the kids are still out of school and everyone's still up at the lake, summer is starting to edge toward the exit.

This always happens, and if I'm always surprised it surprises me, I'm also glad for it. Football media days, so soon? All this talk about how loaded Penn State is, and who's going to play quarterback at Ohio State and Oregon, and names we haven't thought about in awhile -- hello there, Dylan Raiola at Nebraska; howdy, Luke Altmyer at Illinois -- suddenly re-emerging from the shadows?

Bring it on. Bring on Dylan and Luke and that Manning kid at Texas and the Red River Shootout, Longhorns vs. Sooners. Bring on Alabama-Auburn and USC-Notre Dame and Michigan-Ohio State, all the burning rivalries. Bring on Saturday Afternoon, which of course is short for Chris Schenkel's iconic line about Saturday Afternoons In The Fall, which of course is just code for "college football."

I'm ready. Even though college football isn't really college football anymore -- it's just the pro game in drag now, and thus has forfeited romance for commerce -- its grip on me is as firm as ever. Grimly corporate now or not, I still start getting excited for it about this time every year, like a junkie who hates the fix but loves it at the same time.

Get the hell off the stage, summer. Time for fall, and a new jam.