Almost football time. People here are counting the days. I won’t go on and on about it. I’m tired of that to be perfectly honest. I do enjoy it, the drama and the emotion and the collegial cheering. I’ve come to be more interested in the business and the personal. Especially the personal.

Like these stories. I really want to see Shon just blast someone into the dirt, stand over them and say “CANCER!” He deserves that. With playing time in sights, cancer survivor Shon Coleman trying to ‘get better every day’:

The cancer went into remission just weeks after starting chemotherapy treatments in April 2010, and he continued to receive weekly injections following that diagnosis to ensure it wouldn’t return. It never did.

His return to the field came much later, though, as Coleman was finally cleared to practice with the Tigers in April 2012, working back into form ever since.

It’s the versatility and natural ability he showed during his high school career that has him on the verge of breaking into Auburn’s two-deep depth chart, likely the first in line to play whenever starting left tackle Greg Robinson needs a breather this fall.

“I feel comfortable on both sides, really,” he said. “I pretty much got so used to both sides that I can switch up and have everything down pat.”

Another young man, a similar story. Samford long snapper Perry Beasley living college football dream again after beating cancer 3 years ago:

On Aug. 30, he’ll get the chance to run on the field as a college football player when Samford travels to Georgia State. The Georgia Dome is minutes from his home, so family, friends, even nurses who helped treat him, will be in attendance.

And while Samford’s goals are high, Beasley’s shining moment will be realized when he takes the field with his teammates.

“For me, it’s already set — that I’m doing what I love again,” Beasley said. “I definitely think that whenever we run out on the tunnel on Aug. 30, something will come over me that will be really powerful.”

You want guys like that to have that big triumphal moment, check that off the list and move on to big things, knowing they can and they will.

A feel good story of another sort. A WWII POW traded his prized gold ring for some food. Now, 70 years later, the ring has come home:

Last week, about a dozen family members and friends gathered in the living room of David C. Cox Jr.’s Raleigh home and watched as he slit open a small yellow parcel from Germany. The 67-year-old son dug through the crinkly packing material and carefully removed a little plastic box.

“And here it is,” he said with a long sigh as he pulled out the ring. “Oh, my goodness. … I never thought it would ever happen. I thought it was gone. We all thought it was gone.

“He thought it was gone,” he said of his late father.

The story of how the ring made it back to the Cox family is a testament to a former enemy’s generosity, the reach of the Internet and the healing power of time.

Mowed the lawn this evening. Then changed sweaty clothes for workout clothes and got in a little ride. I deemed it a take-it-easy ride, so I only touched 39.1 on the big hill. I did, though, set a new 10-minute distance best for Red Route 2. This is a segment that has a determined starting point where you just go for as hard as you can, for as long as you can, for 10 minutes. It is one of the many nonsensical challenges I’ve created for myself on my bike. This is the first time I’ve broken the first distance mark on this challenge, too. The speed wouldn’t be impressive to you, because I am slow, but I am apparently getting a tiny bit faster. In my first ride after a race, taking it easy on a home 20-mile course.

I will never understand how I get chain grease on the outside of my left calf when the chain is on the right side of my bike.

I’ll probably never understand nutrition the correct way either. We decided that I’m at a negative calorie amount for the day so I was able to eat three dinners. We went out for pizza with a friend. He’s a runner, so it was all miles per minute this, and playlists and marathons that. We’ve become these people. I had two slices of pizza.

Meanwhile, in London, the government stormed The Guardian’s offices to destroy data. Think about that:

I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents… Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age.

England is lost. Hope they’re not the canary in the coal mine.