Welcome back to BC football, where the bad things are bad and the good things are also bad!
After comprehensively stomping an uppity UMass team on Saturday in just about all facets of the game, it looked like we might see the impossible: unanimous approval from BC fans about how things went in a football game. Anthony Brown put up great numbers, the starters were able to be taken out for the entire second half, AJ Dillon picked up where he left off... Other than some nitpicking, especially regarding whether or not vulturing a couple AJ Dillon goal line scores might hurt the Heisman push (an exciting thing to have the opportunity to argue about!), things have been pretty positive.
But of course, there are still some people who, by all appearances, get their joy from hate-watching their own football team. The number of “I’ll get excited when we beat someone good” posts/tweets/comments/whatever in the BC Blogosphere is unsurprising but is no less maddening. If we lose to Clemson, well, Daz has got to go. If we beat anyone less than Clemson, that’s somehow worse.
It even happened last year after beating Louisville and Florida State. BC fans — again, to emphasize, fans who take time out of every Saturday to supposedly enjoy watching the team — couldn’t wait to point out that everyone was “overreacting” by being happy about the wins. UMass is no ACC team (as the 48-7 score at halftime made clear) but the same themes come out no matter how well things go. “I’ll wait to get excited until we beat someone good.” Buddy, we only get 12 of these. We only have a few opportunities to get excited in the first place.
No one is putting us in the ACC Championship Game for beating a team that couldn’t cut it in the MAC. But after getting chirped at all week by bros who like to tell people they go to school in Amherst, yeah, we’ll take a few minutes to enjoy stomping their lights out in response. It was week one of the college football season after not seeing the Eagles on the field for nine months. The team did almost everything we possibly could have asked of them in their warm-up. We as fans set as high a bar for the season opener as possible — complete annihilation — and they actually met it! After months of hype, BC went out and actually launched someone into the sun like we hoped they would.
For the first time in a decade, we’ve got some legitimate hope at being actually, excitingly good. And after game one, Lucy didn’t pull away the football yet!
Yeah, we’re all starry-eyed, dreaming of the long shot of competing to win one of college football’s most impossible divisions. But for God’s sake, all the excitement and optimism could be snuffed out in a week or two. Those of us who actually like this school are going to enjoy the fun while we’ve got it.