I saw this tweet yesterday from Lacrosse Magazine's Jac Coyne and it made me excited and frustrated at the same time:
Useless information file: exactly 100 days until the first NCAA men's lacrosse game.
— Jac Coyne (@Jac_Coyne) November 1, 2012
That's both a positive and a negative. We're now in the final throws of the offseason, closer to the start of the 2013 season than the end of 2012 Championship Weekend. Yet, the college lacrosse season feels so far away. It's kind of like being on the moon, looking back at Earth and wanting to be home, but forced to realize that you still have time to spend on a floating satellite while conducting scientific donuts on the moon's surface in your moonmobile. In fact, it's exactly like that.
Which brings us to the video up there. It's a clip from Jay Jalbert's There and Back, a documentary about Virginia's attempt to repeat its 2011 national championship. It's an inside look at Dom Starsia's program, but for our purposes today, it's a promise for what is to come in just a few months.
People tend to look at me like I'm trying to sell them meat cleavers at a world peace festival when I say that college lacrosse season is my favorite part of the year. There's nothing quite like college lacrosse: the intimacy of the games; the tailgating; the fact that guys are out on the field, taking shots to the neck purely for the competitiveness of lacrosse and a desire to win rather than the potential promise of paychecks with far too many zeros; voices like Eamon McAnaney and Quint Kessenich making you feel like you're wrapped in your favorite blanket and hoping that others will eventually feel the same; the ferocity of the moment and the sportsmanship in the post-game handshake line; the almost painful growing pains the sport is going through as it attempts to mesh a game that still features parents and friends in the stands shaking milk jugs filled with pebbles and the reality that television and mega-events are slowly displacing this aspect of college lacrosse's history; the strategy and storylines and potential for things you've never seen before to take place in each and every game because this is all still new and evolving and, man, it's only going to get better because it's not that we don't know where the ceiling on college lacrosse is, it's because there isn't a ceiling right now; it's having press credentials denied because College Crosse is just a web-only publication and "Are you kidding me? Your average attendance is in the 10's and you don't want a story about the program?"; and it's about the anticipation of caring about something so much -- something that others scoff at as somehow unnecessary or unworthy -- that makes a four-month season that starts in the dead of winter and ends with some of the most beautiful weather of the year feel like a kind of perfection that is only going to get better.
That's not exactly what Jalbert is showing us in the clip, but those are the feelings that it invokes as the calendar turns to November and the fall season slowly recedes in the rearview mirror. We're under 100 days away, you guys.