This is my last weekend of summer, although very little about Saturday felt like summer.
We had a TON of work to do getting everything ready for football season, starting with the RV. We had to replace the awning and the slide-out, replace the exterior skylight and reseal everything. Then came all the normal work that goes with getting an RV ready after it has spent months sitting there, mostly forgotten, before suddenly becoming one of the centers of our universe again.
College football returned Saturday, and I probably watched less of it than I will on almost any Saturday for the next four months. There is something mildly ridiculous about that because I spend most of the year waiting for college football to come back. By June, I am looking for signs of it everywhere. July becomes Media Day preparation, and August turns into fall camp, interviews, practice reports, depth-chart discussions and trying to figure out which things we are hearing actually matter.
Then football finally arrives and I am working on an RV.
Maybe that is what football season really looks like when it becomes part of your life instead of simply something you watch on television. Saturdays do not just magically appear fully formed with food on the grill, drinks in the cooler, friends sitting around the tailgate and football playing on a television somewhere. Somebody bought the food, packed the coolers and remembered the chairs. Somebody checked the propane, figured out what stopped working since November and discovered that several things that seemed perfectly fine the last time the RV was used had apparently spent the offseason developing other ideas.
This year the RV apparently decided it wanted a new awning, a new slide-out, a new exterior skylight and a good resealing before it agreed to participate in another Oregon football season. Fair enough. Saturday became the day to deal with all of that because next weekend the calendar changes, and there will be much less patience for figuring out why something leaks or refuses to move when everybody is supposed to be headed toward Eugene.
That means this entire weekend is really about getting ready. The RV needs to be ready, the tailgate needs to be ready and, somewhere in there, I probably need to get myself ready too.
The funny part is that August tricks you into thinking the football season has already started. I have spent most of the month writing about Oregon football, listening to interviews and going back through things coaches and players said weeks earlier because something they said later suddenly gave the original answer more meaning. We have talked about Dante Moore, the offensive line, the receivers, the running backs, Oregon’s defensive front, the linebackers, the secondary and special teams. We have written about practices and scrimmages and the players who appear to be moving themselves closer to meaningful roles.
