I love you, Mississippi State

Come home.

Back when the Earth was flat, all members of the SEC had a permanent rival on the other side of the East/West line.

There were games steeped in tradition, like the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry, haunted by Heisman winners past and fueled by burning hatred.

There were games bustling with talent, like LSU vs. Florida, where you could watch future NFL stars duke it out in a tilt that often had huge national title implications.

There were games that originally did little other than fill the schedule, like Texas A&M vs. South Carolina, that came to mean so much more due to the intensity of the matchups, with players on both sides nursing grudges, real or imagined, to bring that extra surge of passion when it mattered most.

Then there was us.

As I did my best to shake off a hangover and schlep the mile or so it took to get to the field, we would say that a win here could turn our season around, but we knew it never would. Or conversely when the stars aligned and we managed to build the Big Blue Wall, in our heart of hearts we knew that this was the ultimate trap game and the inevitable loss would drag us back to the kids’ table.

And occasionally y'all would have a big shot quarterback or some unstoppable offensive scheme that could only be halted by the hand of God, and not the three star recruits we could cobble together from the Catholic schools in Louisville, the dying Rust Belt towns of Ohio and the sons of a waning Appalachia.

But most of the time it wasn't that. Not even close. We would head into the game with a win over the fifth best team in the MAC and y'all would have annihilated all the directional schools you could find. With three wins in 15 games between the two of us, this game would be little more than a farce.

It would start strong, of course. A Kentucky field goal would be met with shouts made hoarse by bourbon and bad decisions. The din of cowbells heralded a Bulldog touchdown, when a running back shrugged off a few defenders and bust a 35 yard run.

Then it was chaos. Backs would fumble the ball in ways hitherto unknown on the football field with the ball squirting out in a direction that appeared to violate all laws of physics and sensibilities of man. Quarterbacks would fail to execute on screen passes, hitting shoelaces more than outstretched hands. Failures to communicate in the secondary would leave a receiver without anyone within 15 yards of him, and the quarterback would miraculously heave a decent pass to him only for the whole play to be nullified thanks to the most obvious holding you had ever seen.

For all five minutes when the clanging of the cowbells stopped, your fans were affable. The reason why someone would travel for a whole day to watch this was lost on us. I would like to imagine that y'all felt the same way about the wayward souls who made the quixotic journey down South to watch the game next year.

After the Civil War, every so often veterans from both sides would meet at the sites of famous battles to trade stories, discuss how their lives turned out since the end of the war, and reconvene with old pals. I have always found that to be so odd, yet so human.

These were men who would have ripped each other apart with their teeth, but now that they were old men they flashed gummy smiles and swapped tales.

If I were a Southern farmer, I would have loved to hear what it was like to rally under the battle flag of Maj. Gen. Thomas at Chickamauga, hopelessly standing your ground on the ridge to make sure a bloody defeat didn't turn into a complete rout.

On the other side, if I left my job at the factory somewhere in America’s industrial heartland, I would have been delighted to hear what it was like to dodge cannon fire during Pickett’s charge, going further than any rebel had ever gone but not nearly far enough.

And then there was us.

The Kentucky-Mississippi State game was not Antietam nor Vicksburg. It was some guy who was too short to join the real army but full of enough gumption to defend a warehouse, mercilessly picked off by a cavalryman right before the store was looted. It was some riverboat captain on the Mississippi, roped into shuttling uniforms up and down the river, praying he would never see an artillery piece.

It never meant anything, and it was never pleasing to the eye. You were in limbo, and you liked it.

If a player got drafted in the third round, his name would be praised for the next five years. If we somehow managed to go forty yards without shooting ourselves in the foot with a dumb penalty, our hearts would fill with wild hope. If we made it to CBS, that was a sign that we were now big time.

It was football at its most futile, most pure, most frustrating. And I loved it.

I love you, Mississippi State.