There's no greater or more important secular ritual in Ohio than the one that was just canceled.
You're allowed to be emotionally crushed by it. Well at least you're not on a ventilator isn't perspective, either - it's the same shitty reality of 2020 we're way too familiar with transformed into straw and manure to give you an angle you don't need.
Don't make people feel bad for feeling bad - tell anyone who tries this with you to find a new kink.
We didn't arrive on this planet just to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, or to create shareholder wealth for investors who will never show appropriate gratitude. We have opposable thumbs, bold ideas, big dreams and burning hearts. Wild minds. Deep emotions.
We have a higher purpose than just surviving. Our blip in time here demands value. For a lot of us, it's obsessing over college football every single day of the year. That's our kink.
Ohio State-Michigan is hardwired into the culture, which means it will still be with us long after this year is just a shitty memory.
You deserve more than just being. You deserve bouts of joy. Euphoria. Chanting in large groups of strangers. The good anxiety - we live in the only era in human history where icing the kicker is an expression of meaning. Most of the other stuff we navigate in our daily routines just occupies time and charges our appetites for real living.
The rituals we inherited shaped who we are and what we'll become. We can take care of those sacred customs and pass them on, otherwise they wither and diminish and get replaced by new ones. I didn't choose to be from Ohio. If I was from somewhere else it's just a game might have been something I would have thought yesterday. Maybe my kink would be basket-weaving. But it's this, and it's hard for me to process a year without Ohio State playing Michigan.
Diminishing America's non-fatal losses in 2020 loses the plot entirely - you would never tell a member from the Class of 2020 hey, it's only graduation. Elderly midwesterners have held off on dying until after football season for decades. Alzheimers patients are given medicine that allows them to experience a wedding, a grandchild's graduation or just one more Christmas. It's a terminal disease.
Value is the only benefit Alzheimers meds provide. Our time here demands it. Rituals matter.
When our #BuckeyeBabies heard the ichigan game was canceled #GoBucks pic.twitter.com/KLXix7oH0H
— The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (@OSUWexMed) December 8, 2020
Me too, buddy. Me too. You'll have that blanket forever.
Ohio State-Michigan is hardwired into the culture, which means it will still be with us long after this year is just a shitty memory. The rivalry will survive the pandemic. It's just paused for a moment. You're allowed to be emotionally crushed by it. It's your kink. It's mine too.
Losing The Game is worse than losing the game. This isn't the good anxiety. Let's get Situational.
OPENING: PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Dec 14, 2019; New York, NY, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback and Heisman finalist Justin Fields speaks to the media during a pre-ceremony press conference at the New York Marriott Marquis. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports
The Heisman Trophy will be awarded this Saturday on Earth 2 in a packed Manhattan ballroom, coming off of an intact and virus-free season. Over here on regular earth we're well into the realization that we won't get nearly enough of Justin Fields in a Buckeye uniform. That is coming to an end.
It has been the new Ohio State quarterback tradition with one notable exception. We didn't get enough Dwayne Haskins, who rewrote the record books and then bolted for big tax brackets after one season. We didn't get enough Joey Burrow, whose fractured hand and college diploma sent him to a land renown for never having quarterback controversies.
We didn't get enough Braxton Miller, whose QB career was cut short by virtue of physical sacrifice. We didn't get enough Cardale Jones. We didn't get enough Terrelle Pryor. Over the past decade, only one regular starter has maximized his stage presence in Columbus.
That guy, who also rewrote record books and lost time due to physical sacrifice. It would have been fun to see what Fields could have done in a J.T. Barrett timeline. Following Fields' imminent departure from amateurism, the newest legacy of prolific quarterbacks awaits. That will be fun!
Ohio State football will be just fine. But Fields on a three-month Heisman tear would have been delightful.
INTERMISSION: THE SOLO
Huey Lewis' best album was called Sports. It contains no songs about sports.
The News was a jam band that found itself in an era where hit singles produced generational wealth and fame, while bands like theirs played in obscure venues and needed side jobs to make ends meet. They decided they liked money and hatched a plan.
So the News produced a new album that was less of their low-profit jam-flow tapestry and more a collection of disjointed and self-contained *hit singles* that would hijack radio stations. They named the album on account of a baseball metaphor that captured this strategy, and the third *hit single* was Heart of Rock & Roll.
Like much of the News' catalog, it features a high-energy sax solo. Let's answer our two questions.
Is the soloist in this video actually playing the saxophone?
Huey shouts John-nay! at the top of the solo, which is News sax player Johnny Colla's cue to take over the song. He's juxtaposed among clips of classic rock n' roll performances but during the scenes where it's Colla, it's him actually playing a tenor saxophone. VERDICT: Yes.
Does this saxophone solo slap?
Hit singles require a hit single formula, and Heart of Rock & Roll is as formulaic as it gets. A strong bridge is absolutely necessary in order to transport the listener from the beginning to the end of any 1980s hit single, and part of what delivered 10M copies of Sports to consumers was Colla's expert bridgework. VERDICT: Textbook slapping.
THE BOURBON
There is a bourbon for every situation. Sometimes the spirits and the events overlap, which means that where bourbon is concerned there can be more than one worthy choice.
OHHHH Black Button, bam-alam
Yesterday was a dark day for Ohio State football that many people saw coming. Cancel March Madness, cancel non-conference football, cancel the season, uncancel the season, cancel Maryland, cancel Illinois...whoa, Michigan canceled? Shocked, but not shocking.
This has never happened before in my lifetime and very few others - shout out to my readers born 110 years ago - so it sent me on an unproductive what does it all mean mental trip late last week when the Wolverines paused football at the least opportune time. Never before in our lifetimes. Hopefully never again.
My lifetime began during the Ten-Year War, which means I have no memory of it - I can only recall Woody Hayes as a fragile old guy who took walks with Anne in the neighborhood where I grew up. My lifetime commenced in Rochester, NY about four miles from the Black Button Distillery.
Upstate NY is a colder version of the midwest, which means there's corn everywhere - so it shows up in large quantities in every New York bourbon from Hudson to Widow Jane. Black Button is young and corny, which makes it sweet from start to finish. Honey-drenched nectarines up front with youthful spice and kettle corn down the hatch. It's fun and very easy.
Black Button is different, affordable and attainable - you can buy it directly from their web site and have it shipped to your house (or your friend's house if you live in a state with draconian liquor shipping laws).
This year has taken a lot from us. Bourbon, thankfully, is not among the casualties.
CLOSING: BIGGER FISH
History eventually recycles itself. Good parts. Bad parts. War parts. Plague parts.
Twenty years ago I sat in Ohio Stadium and saw something relatively foreign during the 1990s. The Buckeyes were loose, confident and played like they had nothing to lose. Sure, they were 8-2, had to beat Michigan and needed Purdue to lose to Indiana to get to Pasadena - but they weren't puckered! It was obvious from the outset.
Could this be a turning point in Coop's tenure? Maybe John Cooper just needed a new century to finally understand what he had not quite gotten during the late 80s and most of the 1990s. Ohio State opened the game copying a fake reverse on a kickoff Illinois had used the previous week and scored on the opening drive.
Then the Buckeyes lost, convincingly. They threw everything they had at the Wolverines including a brilliant fake punt which Donnie Nickey dropped. It was a pure distillation of the Cooper Era, from the missed opportunities to the final score to what ended up being an 0-2 ending to the season. It was The Usual.
And it wasn't the turning point in Coop's tenure. The 2000 game turned out to be his final shot at the opponent that defined him. That edition of the Greatest Rivalry in Sports was his 10th L in that 2-10-1 record printed atop on his coaching epitaph. Coop's fifth non-win against the Wolverines in Ohio Stadium was his last.
The Buckeyes have not lost to Michigan in the Horseshoe since. They've only lost twice, total. We occupy a completely different world than the one from 2000.
Millennials and Zoomers are undoubtedly fatigued from The Olds™ telling them about Michigan being the most important game on the schedule; an opponent whose uniforms look great in contrast to Ohio State's on the same field - but whose success whenever they're paired is almost entirely in standard definition, like the clip atop this section.
That clip was three Michigan wins ago. It looks like it was shot in the 1800s. Three Ohio State wins ago was Dwayne Haskins throwing to Austin Mack in 1080p - we should have gotten a 4K version this weekend. Twenty current Buckeyes were on that team. It's been one-sided, but now that it's not happening this season, maybe The Youths™ can understand exactly what we've lost.
Many of them believe Buckeyes' true rivals are Clemson and Alabama, their CFP contemporaries. Ohio State played Clemson four times over the past century and Bama twice over the past 25 years. It does not hit differently when they miss either program in any given season. Ohio State missing Michigan hits differently.
It does not matter how one-sided it's been during the current blip. Perhaps COVID can do what Michigan has failed to for the past two decades: Energize Ohio's youthful stakeholders into putting and keeping the rivalry on the pedestal it held for generations before the CFP arrived and became such a shiny, important distraction from the precious ritual we inherited.
Thanks for getting Situational today. Go Bucks. Take care of each other.
