A little sadder, a little wiser.

A year ago, I wrote this comment on Spencer Hall's always excellent, always exquisite college football season opener. 

A year later, a little sadder, a little wiser: College football makes you part of something bigger than yourself, and that is what makes it so dangerous. It makes fools of us mortals here, the idea of belonging, the idea of defending something so meaningfully meaningless, it makes you willing to step outside your normal bounds of human rationality.

We are the one who believe in miracles, you know. We name our plays after prayers, we speak even jokingly in fears and suppositions, we marry logic and the unseen and we balance this on the backs of young men, the backs of children who we do not know. We come here to our temples built of stone and steel and concrete and we yell out our supplications to the wind.

We have come to no Christian end, we were always there, we will always be there and we know this – yet we come back year after year, hoping that something in this, something in this family balances out the bad, that the money that we raise for good, that the life-extending joy we get, that this…thing is worth it.

Sometimes we’re brought back down to earth, and it hurts so much and reminds us that we are human (or it doesn’t and maybe for a second we think about what happened to us that we got here). Are we ourselves, or are we this thing we’ve given to ourselves, given ourselves (and our dollars and our time) to?
Is this thing worth it?

I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it isn’t.