For whatever reason, last night I actually watched the UT football game on ESPNU. This was my first time ever watching a game on ESPNU, meaning that I have now watched one more Rockets game on there than I have ever watched in person. For whatever reason I just never got around to watching any sports when I was a student at UT, even though I realized that I should at least go to one game of some kind just to say that I’d had that experience as a college student (and while I could get in for free). MCCC doesn’t have any intercollegiate sports — something I always hear from my students about — so I don’t have any opportunities to watch sports in person there either. I guess there was something surreal to watching something live on a national cable network that was happening less than ten miles from my house, even though one of the Professional Bowling Association’s annual majors always takes place at a bowling alley less than two miles from here. I suppose that when I was younger I may have wanted to go to these events just to get my face on national television, but that was before I had my little bout with "Internet fame" that’s turned me off of the concept of achieving fame for life, and, let’s be honest, my face should be on few cameras as humanly possible.

While we’re on the subject of sports, just to expand on what I wrote on Friday, at this point I’ve already pretty much given up on all sports but hockey. It’s not like I have much time to follow sports these days what with the election and all, but with the resurgence of Tigertown officially over, the Bengals returning to their dismal form of past, and the Pistons unlikely to make any progress from last year, it’s just easier for me to forget about all of them right now. On the other hand, the Red Wings re-signed Darren McCarty this past week, so all is once again right in my personal sports world. I doubt the Red Wings will repeat as Stanley Cup champions given the parity of the league, but they’ll probably have more fights this year than in the last three years combined, and that will keep me watching as many games as I can. (That’s one of the problems with my schedule this term, because I’ll likely miss most of the Monday and Wednesday games that aren’t on the West Coast.)

I’m also preparing to give up my Saturday nights to Hockey Night in Canada once again, and it’s only now that I’m really able to appreciate just how much more I can get done on Saturdays in the offseason. Perhaps my love of hockey is affecting my schedule more than I should allow, but I take a strange comfort in having those hockey doubleheaders to look forward to at the end of the week. That results in my Sundays being kind of hectic as I rush to get things ready for Monday — kind of like I am today, because I got booked up with all sorts of other things yesterday — but in the end it seems worth it. I don’t make pretensions of being some kind of hockey expert (though I don’t let that stop me from making silly predictions like the one in the last paragraph), but I am a hockey fan, and maybe I need to be that hockey fan because it’s one of the few opportunities I allow myself to stop overanalyzing every little thing and just enjoy something.