The post that places photos from other days on this day, to show what would otherwise be forgotten, and to have a day’s worth of easy content. Enjoy.
Allie stole her chair back. And she’s holding an iPad hostage, too. Things are very fluid on the front lines:
Three more shots of the foliage that drives all the kids wild:
Nick Marshall is on the loose against Georgia. Pretty sure that’s a holding call that the officials blew. That crew is so talented both sets of fans felt they were hosed by the referees. That’s talent. Anyway, the quarterback picked up 101 yards with his feet on 19 carries:
He’s throwing this one into your office. Marshall was 15 of 26 for 229 yards and a score through the air. Are you ready to complete this pass? Then War Eagle:
Corey Grant is fast. He picked up 53 yards on six touches, including his 21-yard touchdown:
This is Ricardo Louis. He’s still just a freshman in this shot, and not yet a legend. He had four catches and the game-winning score:
Nick Marshall sneaking in for one of his touchdowns:
Here’s Ricardo Louis again. Still just a freshman. But I notice he’s always behind the defenders. Good place for receivers to be. Make them chase you:
I said on the second Georgia possession of the night that they couldn’t slow down Dee Ford, and thus you may as well give him the Heisman now. He tormented Georgia’s Aaron Murray. Indeed, this is the heartbeat before he destroyed him on the last play of the game. Ford is blurry because he moves that fast. This is the way QBs see him in their nightmares:
It has been a long time since I took a picture of a scoreboard:
I’ve been to a lot of football games. I’ve been happy. I’ve been thrilled. I’ve been pleased and surprised and shocked. I’ve been sad. I’ve been numb. I’ve sat through a 3-8 season and a 3-9 season. I’ve watched the slow, inevitable loss of a game to a rival you can’t control because you know your side has no answer. I saw a juggernaut produce an undefeated season. I watched a championship unfold in front of hopeful, too-nervous-to-believe-it eyes.
This game was altogether different than any of those things.
In the first half you abused the other team’s defense, gashing them for 246 yards rushing when they allow about half that per game. You had a 20-point lead, but you’ve lost all of the momentum. In the second half, your defense begins hemorrhaging yards and points against an incredible comeback helmed by the most prolific scorer in the history of the conference. There are six minutes on the clock. You have a narrow lead.
And you go three and out on three pass attempts. Those kids had played too hard and did not deserve to lose, and that’s what the play calling set them up for.
Very frustrating.
And then you punt. An ill-timed shank gives Georgia, and the best scoring quarterback in the history of ever, the ball on your 45. They score. Now you’re behind with under two minutes to go. That sequence starts here.
But these boys have a bit of John Paul Jones in them. And, of course, the perfectly insensible and the divinely improbable happened at the end. This is Rod Bramblett’s radio call, which is instantly a thing of lore:
We had a great view of the final scoring play, standing directly over Nick Marshall’s shoulder. He threw the ball and it was instantly recognizable that the flight path of the ball and the line the boy in blue was taking were not to meet. Hope sank immediately. Then the bounce and the deflection through the unholy Georgia trinity and Ricardo Louis, immediately a living legend as a freshman, kept running. Turns out he turned his head in the last moment of a hummingbird’s heartbeat to find the ball as it fluttered near him.
I covered my mouth. “What the War Damn?”
Angels didn’t sing. They roared. Jordan-Hare Stadium, at the end of the night, was as loud as it has been in the last 20 years. The old Tiger decibel lights on the south end zone scoreboard would have surged, flickered, browned out, returned and exploded. They would have burst into fireballs and landed on the Georgia sideline. There would have been nothing else to it.
How do you react to that play? A heaved prayer that should have never been answered was addressed in most convincing fashion. It happened at the end of an equally inconceivable series of events too dense to unpack and process, even during the tediously long CBS commercial breaks. You saw those young men realize what the writer and philosopher Joseph Campbell meant about not “looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” That’s what they found. I turned to the lady behind and said “We should hug.” And we all did, we hugged everyone, everywhere, mostly because we couldn’t hug Ricardo.
And, in the end, it was the somewhat-maligned defense that sealed the day. Dee Ford’s crushing fait accompli, a bruising blow to Georgia’s Aaron Murray, ended the game as the Bulldogs were looking to score while the final flickering filament in the scoreboard shifted from 00:01 to 00:00. Some of the people there rated it a two on the Rapture Scale. Some folks in the Southern endzone saw it as a three.
Despite the questionable play calls, and an officiating crew no one on the field liked, Auburn won tonight because they never quit. A team that was accused of that and worst last year, showed their moxie and their talent and their grit. They fought hard. As hard as any team we’ve cheered. If they hadn’t already satisfied the sports cliche, they learned how to win. Tonight they deserved it.
We reflected on all of this in the stadium. At the tailgate. Watching it again at home. We reflect on all of this each time we watch the Jordan-Prayer. Still not sure what we all saw. Still anxious about the outcome, even as I watch it a third or fourth time.
My in-laws were here for this game. They are 4-0 across four seasons. They’ve seen a homecoming, a conference game and a cupcake. Today the weather was perfect, the tailgating was amazing, the friends charming and they were there for the most breathtakingly incredible finish of the year, and perhaps in the history of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry.
Now what do I do for an encore?
Here are the game’s Auburn-centric highlights, with more calls from the great Rod Bramblett:
Here are two extra photos from last week’s fall foliage kick. This tree probably won’t have anything left on its limbs the next time I see it. But it is flaring beautifully:
This, more about the sun and the darkness, really, is at my grandparents’ place. While I prefer the longer days like everyone else, we do get some great angles from the sun this time of year:
Elsewhere, I ran my first 10K tonight. I was going to run the usual five, but everything felt OK, so I kept going. When I got to five miles, my previous personal best, I decided I could press on to get the nice round kilometer number. And everything felt more or less OK.
And that continued until I stopped running and took a shower. After that it all seemed like a bad idea. Since then, through the night various and different parts have been achy. My feet and my knees. My feet and my quads. My feet and my calves. Always my feet.
Clearly I have room for improvement.
Things to read …
Which brings us to this, from the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of considerate opinion and coverage of serious issues: OK, You’re a Runner. Get Over It. Once upon a time, kids, the Journal did write about serious things. Promise. I suppose we should blame the Internet.
This young woman was on track to graduate early. And then she had a bad car accident, with a traumatic brain injury. She had to learn to walk and talk and feed herself again. And then she went back to school and graduate. That’s the short version of a remarkable story. Now her brother is trying to raise money for continued therapy. Read about it, and please share that link.
My friend Jeremy from The War Eagle Reader recites the greatest story ever written about a college football game. Worth a listen for football fans:
The weekly post that provides a home to extra photographs from the previous week. Also, it is a nice way to get a day’s worth of content with minimal effort. There’s football on and the weather’s nice and I rode my bike and I got ice cream and you can deal with simple filler. On with it, then:
Rage! Rage against the dormancy of photosynthesis! A famous tree along the first base side of my grandmother’s front yard:
It always seems like you are near the top of the world up here. Not even close. But it seems like it:
We’re just standing outside, look up and see this guy’s wings caught in the early evening sun:
The powerful, defiant flare near the end, the holdout green near the stem, the promise of next spring’s buds already on display. There’s a lot to love about flowering dogwoods:
I got photo-bombed:
The red-orange-green is what I was after. Didn’t quite get it. Still pretty:
David Bradley was a 19th century brick maker. He was also a farm machiner maker. He bought a plow company from an in-law in 1854, building a company that took up a whole block in Chicago. Three decades later he bought out his partner. Before the turn of the century he moved shop to what was then called North Kankakee, Ill. About 15,000 live there now, but the Panic of 1893 almost wiped the place out. Bradley’s operation was courted and they ultimately renamed the village after him.
What came next was common. The Bradley family sold out to Sears, Roebuck in 1910. It ran under Sears until 1962, when it was sold to the Newark Ohio company. Most of the factory in Bradley was destroyed by fire in 1986. This site tells me this cover of my grandfather’s old walk-behind tractor is at least 50 years old:
Someone in my family must always give the blessing. And usually there is a storytelling period after dinner. If there is any general silliness, because my family enjoys silliness, this might get in the way of storytelling. If there is to be the presentation of something there is usually a speech.
I’d already offered the blessing and I had no speech. I’d thought of things to say, but nothing I could say seemed simultaneously big enough and small enough for the moment. I can’t explain that, dichotomy, you’ll just have to go along with it. So I said to my grandfather, about his present, that it was from the four of us: my folks, my wife and me. It was something we did, I said, because of how much we cared for him. I finished my speech saying that we’d cared a lot about this project, and that we hoped he liked it, too.
He unwrapped the box, cut the tape from the folds and he flipped them back and looked at this handsome cherry box with a black background and colorful elements inside.
I had the good fortune to sit next to him and tell him what they all meant. He listened closely. He read, for a long time, the certificate that came with the flag we had flown over the U.S. Capitol. It said that it was flown in honor and memory of Tonice, a Christian, husband, father and grandfather, a medic in the 137th Infantry Regiment of the 35th Division, wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. The certificate noted it was flown on the anniversary of the end of the war.
I pointed out what some of the medals meant. I told him that this booklet had a few pages describing what was involved with each of the medals. I said the rest of this booklet was text about the 137th’s time in France and Germany and Belgium while my grandfather’s father was there. It reads day-by-day. Read it at your own pace, I said. Just please promise me you’ll at least read through Christmas Day.
That day’s notes are comforting. It was important to at least read that much.
All of this had been a mystery in the family. Now, for his birthday, my grandfather suddenly had a lot more information about what his dad did in the war. My great-grandfather had never talked about it that much, if at all. And this would have been far too fancy for such a quiet and humble man. But it was important to me to find it and important to all of us to share it with my grandfather.
By the time I started explaining the medals, my grandmother had walked over. She leaned in to see it the display case sitting on his lap. She was eyeing the walls. Where could we display it?
My grandfather is a pretty quiet man, too. He took it all in, and it was a lot to take in. But his reaction was almost inscrutable. When we left last night he gave me a big hug. This wasn’t new. He thanked me again for the display case. He held on a bit longer than normal and thanked me a few more times. That wasn’t why we did it, of course, but it was a hint about how he felt about the thing, and that was gratifying.
Today my grandmother said he read through all of the pages that I’d given him. He’d read awhile, she said, and then show her something. He’d read awhile longer and then show her something else. She’d thanked me last night for making this for him — How often does someone thank you for something you did for a third person? — and today she made sure that we knew how much he was enjoying it.
He got up this morning, she said, and walked around their house staring at all of the walls. She’d asked him what he was doing. He said he was looking for the right place to put the display case. They’d thought, at first, about hanging it over the sofa in their living room. The way their home is laid out this is essentially the center of the universe.
But, he’d decided there might be glare from the window opposite. He found a new place and we installed the display case today.
We realized it is in a place where everyone who walks in their home will see it. We realized it is also in direct view of my grandfather’s recliner.
