Mid-season crisis.

We are entering the twelfth week of the professional football season, and I am in mid-season panic. Remember August 1st when you were a kid? You would sit up in bed and wonder where your summer is going, why is it going so fast, is it really August? Same thing.

I can't explain how madly in love with football I am. The crunch of two linemen coliding, coaches yelling, the crowds roaring, bad weather games, passes that look like the football is strung on a line, arcing over the feild. One-handed catches, quarterbacks and kickers blocking, laterals and trick plays. Once, watching New England play I actually caught myself saying to my roommate, "There's nothing as sexy as a good audible." And the straightest male fans would agree.

One day, you see something amazing, something a little bit more than human, and a logo gets burned into you. Your blood runs in team colors, and even the smallest girl learns to yell like the best of lumberjacks. Somehow eleven men that I do not know, playing a mere game, assume life and death importance. And the world stops on its axis for gameday. Their pain is your pain, their joy is your joy. You fight with them, you pay to breathe the same air and freeze your butt off with them. Sometimes it seems like nothing more than your sheer will that carries the runner across the goaline, or brings the ball back towards the goalposts. And when the quarterback raises his arms in celebration, thousands of people acorss the country have their own arms up, rejoicing together.

And so now I am engulfed in premature and irrational panic. There will come the Wednesday night when I hear Bob Costas, Dan Marino, Chris Collinsworth and Cris Carter banter for the last time. The camera will pan away from the desk, laden with papers, surrounded by giant men in mismatched suits. February will be dark and bleak, cold and unforgiving. And I will despair.