Sunday Morning Sidewalk: No Cataclysm, Just Morning

 

The sun came up anyway.

It always does.

That is the quiet cruelty of it — and its mercy.

There was no cosmic protest for what happened Friday night. No hesitation in the light creeping through the blinds. No celestial acknowledgment that something precious had slipped through Oregon’s fingers again, just as it did in Pasadena a year ago, when the Rose Bowl felt like a door left ajar and then slammed shut by fate.

Instead, there was morning.

Coffee. Snow on the ground. A dog who did not know what a Peach Bowl was, or a Rose Bowl, or a playoff window, only that the world had been made new again and demanded chasing.

And that, I suppose, is where Hemingway begins to make sense.

“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil… You spend all your time talking, not working. You hang around cafes.”

Or, as it reads in our football dialect now:

You’re a fan.

You’ve lost touch with the soil.

Fake SEC standards have ruined you.

You drink yourself into message boards.

You become obsessed with winning.

You talk endlessly, but you no longer do the work of remembering what any of this is actually for.

We wake up after a season like this — after Indiana, after another postseason gut-punch, after the familiar ache that arrives when a team you loved didn’t quite become the thing you hoped — and we feel stranded. Not just disappointed, but dislocated. As if something essential was taken from us.

But nothing was.

That’s the hard truth of being a fan.

We didn’t bleed.

We didn’t get taped up.

We didn’t need surgery number nine.

There are players in that locker room who have already had more surgeries than most people will have in a lifetime. Knees stitched together, shoulders held by screws, ankles that never quite stop aching. They practiced this week with ice in their veins and tape wrapped around joints that haven’t been right since October. That is college football. Not the trophies. Not the hashtags. The quiet accumulation of pain carried by young men who know the season is short and their bodies shorter still.

Rodney Hardrick belongs to a different era now — a ghost of bowl games past, a reminder that this sport always leaves something behind. His name still echoes not because he was on that field Friday night, but because his story lives inside every player who walks off one in January knowing he gave more than anyone will ever see.

This is where The Replacements sneaks in, oddly and perfectly.

“Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever.”

But the speech everyone remembers is really about something else. It’s about quicksand. About how the more you fight it, the faster you sink. About how sometimes the only way to survive is to stop thrashing and let yourself feel what you feel.

That’s where Oregon is now. And so are we.

Not in defeat.

In stillness.

A season that promised so much, that felt like it was rising toward something real, ended in a way that felt… familiar. Too familiar. Like the Rose Bowl all over again. Like hope getting just far enough out in front of us to make the fall hurt.

But here’s the thing Hemingway understood, and so did that silly football movie:

The sun rises again not because everything is okay — but because life goes on anyway.

We are fans. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Our jobs still exist. Our families still need us. Our dogs still need walking. Snow still falls. Coffee still tastes the same.

The players don’t get that luxury. Not yet. They are still in the quiet, terrible hours where the film hasn’t been turned back on and the next season hasn’t started whispering its promises.

Their pain is real.

Ours is borrowed.

And that doesn’t make it meaningless — it just gives it perspective.

There will be another spring. Another camp. Another quarterback competition. Another August where every depth chart looks perfect in the soft light of hope.

The sun will rise on all of it.

It always does.

And one of these years, when it does, it will rise on something that finally stays.