University of Alabama Football Report for 10/15/04

Even though Cecil Hurt reported that this would be the last Football Report, I assure you, for good or ill, we roll on.

Homecoming weekend means playing Southern Miss, but not for much longer, especially since they keep getting better and we don’t. Change can be a scary thing. If your parents are alive and if they live in the same home you grew up in, write them a thank-you letter – don’t call or, if your sires are hip to the technique, e-mail; give them something tactile, something they can goddamn frame if they wish and hang on one of the walls you used to defame – today. They have saved you more trauma than you know.

Now, all that awaits you is a doorknob at your hip that should be at your head, a ceiling that used to be the sky, and at most the ghost limb of a bed you outgrew decades ago. Imagine entire rooms being amputated. Or worse, the whole house. The whole block. The town gone except for 288 cubic feet of dirt.

Of course, you remind yourself that you’re the one who’s changed, not the old homestead. And it could be worse. That’s the logic behind amputation in the first place, but where to draw that dotted line? You just hope not to awake on the table and hear the doc say, “It had to go. Everything. The whole she-bang. Your whole body’s a memory now.”

So you can’t go home again. But here’s hoping some memories do come back. Last year, Bama’s third string QB played within the plan and brought it home against the Golden Eagles. The plan’s changed, but not the rest.

Roll Tide.