How’s this for perspective? Or is it…prophecy?
Sports headline in January of 2024:
“Buckeyes Bookend the Four Team Playoff Era”
Ok, the backstory. I have a friend who’s currently traveling the space-time continuum and hails from the far-flung future. He is a Time Traveler and successfully announced the 2014 national championship…right after the Virginia Tech loss…on this very site. I know some people who made a lot of money betting those odds the very next week!
Hovenaut…you remember that guy!
Well, he’s been traveling sideways in time, clawing his way around some kind of temporal vortex that exists in eleven different dimensions. Crazy, I know…but he did manage to send a single package to me (through SpaceTimeX, of course) that contained a single slip of papyrus with that headline hastily scrawled upon it.
My interpretation of this “message in a bottle” from the sideways future?
At season’s end, more than one sports journalist is going to use our eventual national championship to quip about “the bookending Buckeyes” or “Ohio State Puts Bow on Playoff Era”.
We indeed are not only a top, dare I say “elite” football program, but we haven’t tended to implode horrendously as other top programs do…on a regular basis.
Hence, most of us are spoiled by excellence, always expecting it, and some fragile people (that 15%?) among our fan base unravel in vitriol, having taken it beyond the game and into violence , which is unacceptable. My guess is that most of these people never got to live through the years of lean.
Yes, the Buckeyes seem to be that guy who fights his way to the top of the hill and refuses to retreat, but just hasn’t managed to be that “last man standing” on a consistent basis. He’s always there, fighting around that eventual champion, sometimes battling nose to nose with him at some point. And often, he watches that champion, after a good run, topple ignominiously off the hill into the dark valley below…only to be replaced by a new and different opponent.
The Buckeyes are the Tom Brady of college football!
But we do tend to ruin other programs…on a regular basis. Our history proves that. And every so often we get to be…that last man standing!
And that’s a good thing.
Gentlemen…the year awaits. Stock up on your favorite adult beverages and mouth stuffers…and enjoy life in rarified air.
The Time Traveler has spoken.
