2024-09-01 00:50:02
The buildings downtown keep getting taller, because it just isn’t Mayberry anymore, is it?
The players are getting paid. The times are changing. Tailgate Guys tents take claim to the good spots on campus, and they charge $25 for the locker room tours now, because it just isn’t the way it used to be. The barbershop downtown closed and moved, and so did the hardware store. Up go more luxury condos. It just isn’t the small town it used to be, is it? It just isn’t like the days gone by, is it? You can’t whistle with a fishing pole over your shoulder anymore and you can’t throw football out in the front yard anymore, kicking up the fallen leaves around you and hearing score updates hollered from the porch, because Auburn just isn’t Mayberry, is it?
What if I told you there was this town where you buy lemonade at the corner?
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What if I told you the town has a football team, and the team has a chance to do better this year?
What if I told you the mayor of the town used to be on the pep squad at the school, and his family ran the bookstore?
What if I told you there’s this columnist for the newspaper who gets people all riled up and upset?
What if I told you everybody in the town knows this tiger, who walks on his hind legs, and he has a name and they’d all promise to you he’s real?
What if I told you there’s this one wide receiver?
What if I told you that on a quiet morning, if you listen real close and if the wind is blowing a certain way, you can hear the marching band practicing?
How naive we’d have to be to think Mayberry is a real place on Earth.
But when that ball’s in the air on Saturday, you’ll feel like it’s true again.
The NIL stuff is all different but when Pat Sullivan and Terry Beasley were here they started allowing freshmen to play varsity and that was a radical change. Texas and Oklahoma are the biggest changes coming to the SEC since, well, Texas A&M and Missouri, then Arkansas and South Carolina. Texas A&M being in the SEC is weird but the idea of Texas A&M being in the Big 12 is starting to feel even weirder. Everybody’s worried about the election but elections are meant to be worried about. In the book Friday Night Lights, there’s a chapter where a player sits in the back of a pickup truck, watching the West Texas sunset, worried sick that the very fabric of society was going to be torn asunder by some existential threat named Dukakis, and that was back in the 80’s. Change is constant. Mayberry was changing.
No matter what’s going on, Auburn is still Auburn, and Auburn can be Mayberry, because Auburn is really how you experience it, how you live it, how you choose to actualize it — and it’s not defined or dictated by some real estate investor group, or anybody who wears a tie for a living.
Auburn is a football coach getting a congratulations on a Sunday walking out of church. Auburn is a kiss in the bleachers. Auburn is a father and son throwing the ball at the tailgate, and it’s the rap song coming through a player’s headphones on his way through Tiger Walk, on his way into war.
When that ball is in the air and 87,000 people are all watching that one ball, NIL and realignment and elections and everything else goes way back on the backburner. Paradise is found. It’s football again. It’s Auburn again, for everyone who wants to live it how they live it.
There’s this town, where the team is the Tigers, and they’re 0-0. There’s this coach, there’s this quarterback, there are these boosters, there’s you and me, the newspaper and the rankings and the schedule. It’s not so different when the ball’s in the air.
It’s familiar. For many, it’s home. For all of us, it’s football season.
