All this feels strange and untrue

They deserve your allegiance, your respect; they deserve at least a mulligan – though after holding the 8th best run offense in America to 108 yards, at home, it seems peculiar that they’d even have to ask for one. It’s October now, and the team that last year had taken you on a disorienting waltz to the outskirts of hatred has already become the enemy of your own expectations, the ones this team has created in just four games. If anything disappointed you last night, it came only because, even if subconsciously, you believed for all of September that this was a great team; a team you could love, a team worth caring about. And if that’s the worst thing that has happened in this month of evolution and renaissance – where the curtain has opened to a defense that can finally keep what the offense gives it; where we constantly witness the valediction of Old Michigan, last year’s Michigan, and those before it; the ones that slowly bled every reason we had to believe in this team out of us, scarring our arms and staining the sleeves of our shirts as persisting reminders of how bad things once were.

If Saturday night’s 28-point, 518-yard, 38-minutes-with-the-ball performance were all it took to roll up your sleeves and bear the scars left by Herrmann and the stodgy traces of Lloyd that seem to evaporate with every day, then my hopes for this team are even higher than they were last night at 7:56 p.m., as I drove home from dinner with little regard for stoplights and stop signs and pitfalls to my burgeoning optimism and abolishment of the superstitions I used to rely on. I’m still not sure whether this is understood: Michigan is 5-0 for the first time since 1999. Braylon Edwards could not get into an R-rated movie in 1999. So I’m telling you, don’t take this from me, this fucking feeling I want to have and know the team has earned the right to give me; don’t let the poison-tipped arrows of nay saying message board users take this from you – not when the team keeps handing it to us every week.

I’m sure now you’ll hear all about how the defense was just exposed. That the team which was holding offenses to 18 yards rushing just got a reality check by some nobody named Amir Pinnix. “Amir was only a two-star recruit in high school,” they’ll say. “Who the fuck cares who Ron English is?” Well it turns out Laurence Maroney was just a two-star recruit himself, and in July he signed an 8.75 million dollar contract with the Patriots. In Minnesota’s previous 10 home games their rushing yardage went like this: 282, 355, 349, 301, 411, 182, 327, 337, 319, 288. They were 3rd in the country in 2005, 5th in 2004, and 3rd in 2003. That 182 total there? That was on Ohio State’s defense last year, an NFL minor league team in every sense of the term. And Michigan held Minnesota to 76 fewer yards than that yesterday. I know Maroney’s gone, and I know Eslinger and Setterstrom are, too, but those linemen were drafted in the sixth and seventh rounds, and Maroney was nothing before he got to Minnesota. So how do we know this year won’t end the same way, with merely a new set of parts using the same template of old?

Maybe Michigan didn’t obliterate it the way it has every other offensive entity this season, but it never let the running game become a focal point. Through everything that happened, I still saw what Michigan was doing to Minnesota more prominently than I saw what was being done to Michigan. Captain Chad slung parabolic creeds into the arms of atheists with each bafflingly precise strike to Manningham and Arrington; Steve serenaded us with the inconspicuous talents he was unfortunately blessed with, the ones I fear we’ll never appreciate unless they’re returning a kick 70 yards. And Mike, reestablishing the parameters of hyperbole with every movement, elusive as a falling leaf – nothing too fast, but always tempting enough for some poor soul think he has a chance. His instincts are the closest to a fan’s as any player’s I’ve ever seen – wind the clock, he motions to the side judge, and smile helplessly at press conferences because these are the greatest moments of your life, and you know that they are. He represents each of us, playing with the ability we wish we had, possessing none of those intimidating superstar skills that detach us from the physical marvels we’re only connected to by the team the play for and the team we root for.

We all feel this sense of paranoia no matter how big Michigan’s lead gets. Because that’s the only way we’ve been able to look at them the last few years. We wait for something to go wrong, because it always seems to. We’ve almost been conditioned to enjoy just 52 minutes of football – and “enjoying” was all relative, really, since we only enjoyed the finite pleasures of the score itself, and never how it was attained. After that, just pack your bags and head home; the show’s ending early. There were only varying levels of perpetual failure and dissatisfying outcomes. The paranoia is just how we have to protect ourselves, it’s a defense mechanism we were forced to learn with every Vince Young zone-read and Jim Herrmann mental collapse. But now, when they hold off the offenses whose comebacks never actually materialize, as they did last night with Minnesota, it’s not by the skin of their teeth, or by some Braylon Edwards miracle, but so authoritatively that we never have a chance at the euphoria or sudden sadness – like Manningham’s catch or Gary Russell’s run (which, to be fair, was so inexplicable that I was too numb to feel pain by the time the field goal was kicked). And when it’s over, we look at the screen. It’s another double digit victory. And we can almost imagine Ron English saying back to us “What are you making that face for? You mean you weren’t expecting this?”

There was a moment, a few seconds after Mike Hart’s 54-yard run, where I saw Lloyd say into his headset, with the corners of his mouth unable to resist a grin, “That was a fucking great call.” You know, not as if DeBord happened to win the lottery up in the booth and guess the right play, but that in some way, Mike scribbling across the field like the stylus of an Etch-A-Sketch was all planned; pre-meditated. I know it will take a while before I have the amount of confidence I want to have, but for now it seems like the coaches are making up for it. DeBord, English, Stripling, Szabo, even Lloyd. And it puts me at ease, knowing there’s someone stronger and more thick-skinned than I am to shelter my delicate hopes. Even in the dim lights and fake grass of the Metrodome, as my team – our team – only wins by 14 points and stays perfect for seven more days.