Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

Boxing is one of those sports where I never once fantasized about being a champion.  As a child, I dreamed of catching the winning pass in the Super Bowl, I dreamed of hitting the walk off bottom of the ninth, down 3 runs in game 7 with the bases loaded grand slam.  I even dreamed about hoisting the Stanley Cup and to a lesser extent, the Worlds Cup.  Looking back I really set the bar high for myself in my fantasy’s!  But I never once wanted to be a boxer.  What fun is a sport where even under the best case scenario, your going to get hit in the face a couple times?

So the only boxing experience I can draw upon is the experience I gained playing Mike Tyson’s Punchout.  I’d much rather Lil Mac get his kidneys worked over than myself.  Anyway, there would be a point in a fight where you could smell blood in the water.  Where you knew if you made that one connection, your opponent was done.  (It also worked the other way as well, it wasn’t like I didn’t take my shots from Soda Popinski a time or two).  Well today is October 24, 2009 and the Maryland Terrapins have arrived at that point.

We are tired, we are exhausted, and we are down on our luck.  One more loss and it is just about over.  (I’m going out on a limb saying VT would then give us loss #7 if we hadn’t had it yet).  The Terps are up against the ropes and as fate would have it, what team is laying in wait to deliever that knock out blow?  Everyone’s most hated ACC foe, the Blue Devils.

Everyone who bleeds Maryland red, hates Duke (actually you can insert any color blood in the ACC and the statement still rings true) but we in the Free State have a deeply engrained passion for hating Duke.  It is sometimes hard to remember but we are a land grant college.  We are a school who was founded to give an education to the farmers and craftsman’s sons (and eventually daughters).  We are the ultimate public university.  To us Duke represents everything that is wrong with this country.  We learned in our history class that the blood of the American Revolution washed away the notion that some people were better than others.  There would be no Kings in America, no princes or princesses.  No Earls of so and so, and certainly no Dukes of anything.  You are your own man, and it doesn’t matter who  your father is.

But Duke is the blue bloods.  There it matters what car you drive, and who’s your father.  The word “Privelege” comes to mind (and I’m not referring to that CW show with the hot tudor that comes on after 90210).  It is everything that we fought to destroy rising up again on our own soil.  And that is why we hate them.  Now I’ll admit, this wasn’t the first version of this post.  The original was too tame, so I touched it up a bit, but that is what we do for Duke.  Take it up a level. 

Now if only the football team gets that message.  I have lowered my expectations, I have put up with the turnovers, I have stood beside you in the rain, I have travelled across country to cheer for you in the valley of the hippies, and that is never going to change, but it has been a pretty thanksless job in 2009.  And though I’m married to this team for better or worse, could you please somehow find a way to hold on to the ball and Please….PLEASE…..PLEASE…..BEAT DUKE!!!

Extra Droppings

A little change of pace, we had a terrible year for pumpkins in the garden, but I’m happy to report the peanut harvest is progressing well.  I have about 1/3 of them pulled up drying outside, and though I started with the thinnest looking row, the results are very encouraging.  Who says you can’t grow peanuts in Maryland?  Not me! 

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 7:09 am and is filed under Maryland Terps Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.