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I’ve been reading a lot about space lately. And by “reading a lot about space” I mean “playing Connect Four with Wikipedia articles”. One subject that I find particularly fascinating are the Voyager satellites.
In 2012 Voyager 1 exited our solar system and last month became the farthest spacecraft from our special life-sustaining rock and it is still (technically) sending data. That’s crazy! Something built 14 years before the internet was really a thing and is 16 years older than me is the only piece of garbage we’ve ejected out of our solar system and it still works fine. It will continue to work until it slowly starts to turn off around 2020 or so, become totally useless sometime in 2025. Our special little boy will live for 48 years, but his journey won’t end there.
Voyager 1 doesn’t really have a choice than to keep going. Once something gets that far into interstellar space, it kind of has to keep on as it was. Newton’s First Law and all that. It will just keep on keepin’ on for the rest of eternity until it hits something or something hits it (or is found by sentient life).
That’s what we’re quickly approaching as college football fans. We have plowed through the long offseason yet again and are within sight of the finish line. I know in January it felt like we would never make it to kickoff, but remarkably we have defied the odds and gotten here (mostly) in one piece.
We’ve all had our own coping strategies to get here, whether it was diving head-first into one of the best World Cups ever or supporting A Good Baseball Team or even something drastic like getting married, procreating, and being an otherwise productive member of society. I personally have used that time to make some adjustments in my life that have since paid dividends.
But the time to turn off our jets propulsion systems is rapidly approaching. Soon we will be able to drift for five months and take in our beloved sport in all of its natural splendor. We are hurtling toward college football’s event horizion and on Saturday we will enter the point of no return. We will not fully be in the 2018 college football season’s warm embrace until Thursday, but at 4:30 CST Saturday we will cross the line officially.
We have made it.
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Week Zero Shift
The 2018 college football season starts with [reads notes] Duquesne and UMass on [shuffles notecards] ...the ELVN Network and NESN? Yeah, good luck legally catching this game, but it bears the distinct honor of being the first Division I game of the season, so put some respect on that game.
Things ratchet up a bit an hour and a half later when OVC powers Jacksonville State meet up with NC A&T as a part of ESPN’s FCS Kickoff, which is really cool in that it gives FCS teams a chance for exposure that they wouldn’t get until the playoffs roll around in the space between conference championships and bowl week. Rice also hosts Prairie View A&M at the same time if you really want to drink from the firehose.
But for most of you, the attention will probably be focused on the last two games. Hawaii and Colorado State play the first straight up FBS game of the season for those of you who are wrong and count that as the “first game of the college football season”. That is on The Channel Formally Known As The Forbidden Channel, which I am contractually required to acknowledge it’s easy accessibility after shitting on it for two years.
And then at 7:00 we get the crown jewel of Week Zero, the hipster “I only listen to music released on Bandcamp” special of Wyoming at New Mexico State. Bask as the college football hipster internet tears itself apart at the seams between the undying nerve to yell “GO POKES POWDER RIVER” at every opportunity and the immense likability of the only Aggies who wear red in college football.
...and that’s it. Relatively light Week Zero compared to the recent years, but I’m on record as liking the idea of turning it into an FCS showcase with a mid-level FBS game rounding out the first Saturday of the college football season.
At any rate, our long national nightmare has ended and college football has returned. Celebrate it.