The fun of sports – the reason it is such irresistible escapism from an increasingly terrifying world – lies in its immediacy. When you are watching a sporting event, you are not worrying about the state of the planet, or fretting about your finances, or disappointed in your job and career, or finding yourself entrenched in any sort of philosophical crisis. You are just watching a game. If your team wins, you are happy. If they lose, you are sad. There is nothing in life this black and white, and sports’ brilliance lies in that simplicity. What you are watching, you are watching right now, and right now is all that matters.

If there’s one nagging issue that plagues Georgia football fans, I’ve found it is that they have a unique difficulty in living in the moment. Whatever is happening right now, for many fans, can often feel beside the point. Georgia football fans are always either reliving the past or fretting about the future. Whether it was the age of Mark Richt’s 10 wins never being enough or, today, when Georgia has one of the best teams it has ever had and it is just one game away from the whole universe of everyone’s hopes and dreams opening wide right in front of them, and almost everybody I know here in Athens is either dreading Saturday’s game or actively avoiding it … the present is a slippery, elusive concept, a place no one ever quite feels comfortable living in.

This 2018 season, the one where Georgia went 11-1 and destroyed every team it played except for one, has to be the sleepiest season of extended dominance in recent memory. Georgia had one bad game, in Death Valley, a place where countless SEC teams’ seasons have gone to die over the decades, and otherwise, they really didn’t sweat once all year. They flattened Florida, they crushed Kentucky (in a game that was described as the biggest in Kentucky football history, which was sort of amusing considering it was maybe Georgia’s fifth biggest this year), they demoralized South Carolina, they breezed by Missouri, they barely even noticed Auburn was on the field with them and what they did to Georgia Tech is illegal in three-quarters of the states in this country. Georgia’s rivals are so far behind them right now it takes a connecting flight just to get a glimpse of Uga’s tail. Everything – well, almost everything – Georgia could have hoped for when it fired Richt and hired Kirby Smart has happened. Georgia is at last at the place it has always believed it deserved to be … where it belonged.





And yet it seems to have all been greeted with a bit of a shrug? Everywhere I look, this revolutionary season – one that we’d all be losing our minds over if it had happened any other calendar year other than this one – is greeted with something resembling indifference. Sure, Georgia fans are still showing up on the road like they always do; I saw them taking over Bourbon Street in October just like you did. But the vibe is off this year. Home crowds, scared off by intense early-season temperatures, never really recovered after the month off between Vanderbilt and Auburn; they showed up for the Tigers, but the place never quite lit ablaze in a game that was won with the usual cold efficiency. (The weather for the Massachusetts game was picture perfect, and Georgia Tech is Georgia Tech, but there sure were a lot of people impersonating empty seats at both.) The tickets for the SEC Championship Game – the SEC Championship Game! Which Georgia is playing in! For the right to reach the playoff! – are half what they were last year, and, anecdotally, about half the people I tailgated with in Atlanta pregame last season aren’t bothering coming into town this year. Georgia is 11-1, ranked No. 4 in the country and is having a season that roughly 127 college football programs would sacrifice a relative for. And I can’t talk people into coming to the SEC Championship Game with me. To paraphrase the now-disgraced Louis CK, everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy. What is wrong with everybody?

Part of this is the obvious, of course: It’s Alabama. It’s Alabama standing in the way this week, the way that Alabama is always standing in the way. It has been infuriating for Georgia fans to watch nearly 40 years as Auburn, and Florida, and Tennessee, and LSU, and Clemson, and even freaking Georgia Tech have won national championships while they haven’t, but, still, no team sticks more in the psyche of Georgia fans than Alabama. They are forever the rabbit Georgia cannot catch. Whether it was 2012 and the helplessness of that clock running out, or the soggy sadness of that home 2015 blowout or, of course, the way last year’s national championship game, an instant nightmare so total that it felt like there should be some sort of ribbon pin Georgia fans should be wearing, a death in the family, “Athens Strong.” Georgia fans have gotten their hopes up before when it comes to Alabama – that 2015 game remains the last time Alabama was not the Vegas favorite in an individual football game – and those hopes have been dashed time and time again. And this year they have a typical Alabama team except they also finally found their own Cam Newton in Tua Tagovailoa, who throttled college football around the neck with that final pass last year and hasn’t let go since. We’re gonna beat that guy? And this team? No one wants Lucy to pull the football away yet another time. Best not bothering to try to kick.

