The interesting reality of my life is that after yesterday’s game, I went to lunch with my wife and then picked up Fiji. While my wife was apologizing, Fiji was oblivious to everything. She just walked.
We went on a good four-mile walk around four o’clock yesterday, and it went about how you would expect. On this loop, she took me around a couple of different parks in the neighborhood. We went by a pickleball court. We saw some of her dog friends. They played. It was like any other day to her, and she was overjoyed to be able to take a long walk.
It reminded me first of just how precious moments are — and then it took me back to an article I wrote after Oregon’s loss to TCU in the Alamo Bowl.
I wrote then about waking up the next morning and discovering that the sun had, in fact, risen. There had been no cataclysmic response to the result of a football game. Life had simply continued, as it always does, and I was reminded that we are fans. Nothing more and nothing less.
That does not mean the games do not matter. Of course they matter. There is a sort of tribal or territorial pride involved in college football. We spend our money, we plan our Saturdays around kickoff times, we cheer, we revel in victory, and agonize in defeat. Yesterday hurt because we invest something of ourselves in this thing.
But there is also a point where I try to put put myself ahead of the truth.
The players and coaches care more about what happened in Stillwater than any of us possibly can. When we got up this morning, our futures were not dependent on the result of yesterday’s game. Most of us will go to work Monday. We will take the dog for a walk. We will eat dinner with our families. We will argue about play calling, recruiting, missed tackles and whether Oregon can still find its way back into the College Football Playoff conversation.
For the people inside that building, yesterday follows them to work.
That was one of the things I was trying to remind myself of nearly 11 years ago. Wins matter. Losses matter. Coaches are evaluated because of them, players spend enormous pieces of their lives preparing for them, and there is no reason for fans to pretend disappointment is somehow irrational.
But it is still a game played by young men.
Fiji did not know Oregon had just lost to Oklahoma State. She did not care that a team expected to contend for a national championship had been pushed around for much of the afternoon by a 24-point underdog. She wanted to walk through the park. She wanted to see her friends. She wanted to smell whatever it was that apparently required three uninterrupted minutes of investigation beside one particular tree (it was probably a mouse; she is an excellent mouse hunter).
And somewhere during those four miles, yesterday’s game started moving into its proper place. Not forgotten. Not excused. Just placed.
That is probably an important distinction this morning because there will be plenty of time to talk about what went wrong. There should be. Oregon was not prepared to play to the standard it has established for itself. The offensive line struggled. The defense was pushed around. There were penalties, communication problems and moments when a team built to compete with the best programs in college football simply did not look like one.
Those questions are real. So is this morning.
The sun came up again. Fiji will probably want another walk. Somewhere inside the Hatfield-Dowling Complex, players and coaches are already dealing with yesterday far more personally than I ever will.
And there is another game coming.
There always is.