stop your sobbing

Standing at the podium afterward, LaMarr was asked “Did this feel at all like last year, with losing the lead at the end?” And involuntarily his puffy eyes – no doubt dried and bloodshot from the anguish we want each of our idols to feel when something goes wrong – glared down at him, as if appalled that a flawless season, cobbled together only with the team’s own unflinching confidence and the sullen loyalists’ rectified optimism, could be reduced to “last year”, when Michigan slowly amputated all that we love about this game with a dull razor blade and a sheet of sandpaper. Then in an instant the notion that this team had earned immunity was scorched to ash by the flames that had inspired them to win 10 games in the first place.

Had he grumbled something close to “no,” the entourage of adoring journalists before him would have lauded the defense just the same a day later – his defense had earned it, of course, and coaches will always be vilified before the players; he was innocent if he wanted to be. But in a brief moment of introspection, LaMarr realized that sitting in the shadows only made the Truth more lethal later on; like, perhaps, November 18^th, when there’s never anywhere left to hide. “A little bit…A little bit,” he said, with each syllable cleansing his team of last season’s sins – the courage to be honest brings progress. Last year he saw that his team had become the same one every Michigan team since ‘97 thought they had a right to be. Memories of the mythical Charles Woodson were smeared across Michigan’s legacy like lingering cave paintings of an indomitable prehistoric tribe, immortalized by a transcendent king.

Michigan has always had a reputation of vast significance, leaned on like an oak walking stick; leaned on for so long it rotted into a splinter and gorged the hand of this program, only to go untended and finally become infected somewhere in downtown San Antonio late last December. No more than a second and a half passed between the reporter’s question and LaMarr’s answer, but he had to be thinking about that. Or maybe, in the most satisfying solution of all, he had already been thinking about it; for hours, for weeks, for months – because deep down, our greatest fear is that the athletes we root for do not care about the game as much as we do. I’ve seen this team play, I’ve seen it win, and I can’t say I feel like it’d lie to me.

For four three years LaMarr played for a Michigan team that never brought him anywhere but just short of where he wanted to be – a championship; the elite; the only place we’d ever settle for. And so LaMarr spoke not like a man who was content surviving in spite of Michigan’s errors, but one that would be motivated to change because of them. Michigan is 10-0 now – peculiar to see, but Michigan has been playing every Saturday since September 2^nd and they have not lost a single game – and LaMarr’s left with just three more games. No, not in the sense that he needs to savor them, but that he has just three more games he needs to win. “But, you know,” he said gratefully. “Last year we lost the game…this year we won.”

And I’ll be damned if I let anything but those last four words change how I feel about this team. I live an ordinary life; I have simple pleasures. I like girls in my bed, milk with my cookies, and Michigan to win every single game it plays. It’s a bit of a shame to say that my life revolves around four months a year, the anticipation before them, and the mourning after them, but I couldn’t tell a lie so blatant as to say Michigan’s football team isn’t what really makes an ordinary guy want to wake up in the morning. I’ve read the words of hundreds who can find nothing but trifling flaws in this team – “disaster looms,” they say. And then Michigan wins another game. There’s no harm in objectivity, but by now what good does pessimism do? At a certain point you just stop worrying about the meteor in the sky, sit quietly, and hope you’re still alive after it crashes into the earth. It seems to me as if the pessimists keep waiting for this team to be exposed, almost angry that it hasn’t happened – because it will happen, they think, and the longer it takes, the more their desire swells to fucking believe in it. I’ve spent years waiting for a team that could continually inspire faith week after week, a team that could stand in front of the same podium so many failed heroes have stood in front of, and convince me that a winning is all I had to fucking care about – the hows and whys were unimportant, and they’d make sure they remained so. I guess I stopped waiting two months ago; I was positive I had it at Notre Dame.