After agonizing over musical accompaniment for this season … I returned to an old friend. Take it away, Professor …

I picture Rich Rodriguez hunched on a couch with a notebook in hand while silent practice film flickers on the screen. He takes a note, rewinds, and takes another.

I imagine Denard Robinson, Devin Gardner and Tate Forcier nodding in compliance as yet another offensive meeting rolls on. They occasionally look at each other with the friendship forged among a unit in combat together, mixed with an aloofness that comes with the knowledge only one of you will emerge the victor.

I think about Jordan Kovacs dutifully performing his rehab exercises and watching his diet, doing everything humanly possible to make sure his surgically repaired knees hold up long enough to keep his Wolverine dream alive.

I look at the rain splashing on my windshield as the Taurus glides down US 127 on a gloomy Friday night. I take mental inventory of a depleted bank account that holds just enough funds to transport to Ann Arbor and back, with perhaps a few drinks. Like the salmon of Capistrano, I am drawn to this game.

It is September 3rd, 2010.

Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in

Times have been lean since The Revolution began. We’re living on the backstreets of the college football world. Nobody wants to be beaten and looked down upon. Least of all those wearing the Winged Helmet. You don’t come to Michigan to be known as the coach who pissed away four decades of excellence. Recruits don’t dream of laying face down on the turf in front of a stunned 110,000 while the Toledo Rockets storm your field. Students don’t expect to lose two straight to their former high school classmates up in East Lansing. The wine and cheese donors don’t pay good money to hear some West Virginian with an 8-16 record awkwardly relate a Lion King story and a metaphor about ropes on a cliff at their fundraising dinner.

With a love so hard and filled with defeat ..... Running for our lives at night on them backstreets

You could be forgiven for feeling that our Revolution has been destined to fail. From a controversial buyout onward, things have not been coming up Michigan. The black and white world of sports is a blessing and a curse. Nerd sportswriters and angst-ridden fans compose page after page of hate filled diatribes. They create complicated charts to explain why players suck. Players are graded from a distance by men who aren’t your coaches.  Men who represent, in theory, the institution a fan takes pride in are personally and viciously insulted for their inadequacy.

Ah, but then there is the flip side.

The athlete receives a 60 minute time slot to show why everyone is wrong. And once the score has been registered, there is nothing the men outside the arena can do to take away what the man inside the arena has accomplished. Wins are not taken away after the fact by mathematical formulas.

There is no better, or stranger, feeling on this planet than what happens inside you on a late summer day when you put the pads in the game pants and look at that bright, clean jersey for the first time in a season. You immediately recognize that months of never-ending torture, ice packs and soreness in tiny muscles you’d have never known existed has been leading steadily to the moment that is only minutes away, when you take the field and everything in the world except 100 yards of green turf and 11 men in different colored shirts disappears. For months you have argued and competed viciously with the men that share your locker room, a cramped place that has a smell only those who have experienced it can even begin to claim to enjoy. You look at them now, your new family, and realize that it’s only you now. This is the time to silence the doubt. 60 minutes to show the world how hard you’ve worked and how much you’ve suffered to play to your absolute height of potential. Because to them, and to yourself, it didn’t happen if it doesn’t show up on that field.

I’d run over a kitten to sit on one of those benches and watch my friends bob their heads to their iPod or lean back in silent meditation once again. But alas, I am old and washed up. These Ann Arbor weekends are the closest  I can come.

Huddled in our cars waiting for the bells that ring in the deep heart of the night to set us loose from everything...

The lines have been drawn. Not so much publicly, but we know the score. Rich Rodriguez and his coaching staff knows what must happen this year. If they fail, they will be left with a nagging thought in their minds forever – what could have been at Michigan? – and a stain on their reputations that will take many wins in a far off land to wash away.  Rich Rodriguez has only one way to politely tell his detractors to kiss his ass. He must win. He knows this. We know this. Win, and Michigan will be his.

The seniors of 2011 – such as my beloved Tay – will be staring down a coaching transition and the surreal possibility of being a Michigan senior class that graduates without playing in a bowl game. They will be forever tarred. Forever cast to a side table, way off in the corner, at reunions. Invitations to Braylon’s golf scramble will be mysteriously and consistently lost in the mail.

You may be full of anticipation and fear on the eve of 2010 – these men are running on enough nervous aggression to power a battleship. Nobody wants to fail. And everybody knows what must be accomplished. Maybe failure is our destiny. But Michigan still gets 60 minutes to decide that. It’s come to this. Everything on the field. All questions answered. Fates resolved. No more speculation. The future will be decided.

Some hurt bad, some really dying ... at night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying...

You can blame it all on me Terry ... It don't matter to me now

But don’t despair, comrades. I have a feeling. There’s something about this team that I’ve grown to love more than any other Michigan team in my lifetime, even through the struggles. I refuse to believe that faith is unjustified. No, it is simply based in a reality that hasn’t quite arrived yet.

Our boys aren’t Desmond Howard and Ty Wheatley or Braylon and Hart or Henne and Long or even Navarre and Bellamy yet. But that’s not who they should be. They have to be themselves, and forge new legacies. The rest of the world can piss and moan all they want. We see the truth on the horizon.

They see a bust. We see a legend on the verge of breakout.

They see disappointment in the making. We see potential playing with new motivation.

They see unanswered questions. We see a three headed beast ready to be unleashed.

They see walk-ons and left-overs. We see the personifications of dedication.

They see injuries and size. We see hell on wheels.

They see a fraud. We see a leader.

They see losers. We see MICHIGAN.

At 3:30, Michigan kicks off Game 1 of 12 against Destiny. And we’re fighting until the last second of the last game.