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It may really be bliss, at least in some cases
Maybe it’s the first real heat of the year. Maybe it’s the release of the trailer for the first college football video game in 11 years. Maybe it’s just the general excitement that always seems to accompany the changing of the season. Whatever it is, it’s got me thinking about football, and I’m feeling like I’m ready to be hurt again.
As we strike out bravely into a post-Drake Maye world, there are plenty of questions surrounding the program we know and love. Who will be quarterback? Will there be defense? Will the ACC survive in any recognizable form? I have precisely none of the answers to these or any other questions swirling around the forums and water coolers and Tar Heel Blog slack channels.
I don’t hate this, the not knowing. It’s an unusual thing for me, to embrace the ignorance; typically I fight like hell against it, overwhelmingly afraid of being caught out as a fraud or an idiot. The thing is, though: nobody really knows. There’s a post I’ve written about this before, on a dusty shelf somewhere in the Tar Heel Blog records department, but the upshot is this: nobody fully knows what’s going to happen. In this beautiful, dumb, brutal, beloved sport, the great equalizer is the irregular bounce of the weirdest ball this side of a wiffle ball field.
There are people who are paid a great deal of money (deserved or not, or sometimes both in the course of one season) to make a more educated guess than the rest of us about all of this. The coaches and analysts in the building are working already on back-up plans to contingencies in an effort to be ready to respond to whatever happens when that familiar violence breaks out between the sidelines. They likely have been since the clock hit zeroes in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl in December. Their burden is to worry in a more specific way about the questions I mentioned before, and ideally to take action to remedy these concerns before toe meets leather on a new season.
This ignorance, while likely one of the more stressful parts of an already-stressful job, is a welcome release for a casual fan/sports blogger. I don’t need to have any answers; I’m not the one who will be asked the questions when the season is underway. All I can do is wait, and hope, and it’s often much simpler to fully lean into that hope when you don’t know any better. The pain of last year’s collapse has all-but-faded into a dim memory, the sting lessening to a dull throb, indistinguishable from seasons before or after.
In spite of myself, I’m getting more and more excited. College football is my favorite sport in the world, and just across the baking gulf of the summer months waits a brand new season that promises seismic changes (some welcome, some less so). I don’t have any answers to the questions that plague many Tar Heel faithful, but I do have hope that someone does. As I sit here in the springtime heat, in my blissful light blue ignorance, I can’t wait to find out.
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