Hallelujah.

It started. Thank. Fucking. God. I really don't know how much longer I could've gone watching that ridiculous sport with a wooden stick and little ball and where it's against the rules to kill the other team. Seriously, watching baseball and tennis in the weeks leading up to football season is like drinking your own piss in the desert. It'll get you there, but you're drinking piss. And spare me that the NFL preseason whets the appetite. That I liken to bagging the fat-but-not-so-much-in-strategically-striped-clothes-and-in-a-dark-smokey-bar chick, technically you got what you want, but not really and you'll hate yourself in the morning.

But all that's over now for college football is back and I'm thrilled through and through about it. Most people have to take inordinate grams of mescaline to achieve the smile I have on my face. Now I can watch ESPN again. Now I can feast my eyes on blurs of orange and blue violence. Now I can sound my barbaric yawp again.

I never thought I'd be so happy to watch the Wolfpack and Gamecocks play a football game. So can we please talk about how great this feels for a moment? I feel this is something to which we should dedicate some time. I cannot imagine a world without college football. I hope there's a treaty of some sort that makes sure that if we go to war, the other side has agreed not to destroy college football lest they trigger a nuclear war. Any outside country's interference, or what's worse, cessation of college football, will be regarded as a nuclear attack on the United States which shall be met with equal or greater force. It's only fair.

What is it about this game? The players are kids, strangers, and willful. The fans are crass and obnoxious, the colors loud and clashing, and the coaches are melodramatic and Machiavellian little Napoleans. But the excitement is electric, the tension more palpable, the beer colder, the weather cooler, the sun brighter, the sky bluer, grass greener, and, just as Matt said, I get older, but the girls stay the same age.

Welcome back, college football. I've missed you terribly.