Win Win

It’s a beautiful fall day as I sit down to type out a few words on my smartphone. Blogging gives me a chance to spend a few minutes getting thoughts down, before the moment changes and the feelings are lost. and this is a moment that I want to preserve in some manner. The arrival

It was a good day for omens

Saturday morning, Evanston, Illinois My daughters are both ice skaters, which makes practice ice a reality for me, several times a week. On Saturday morning, as the rest of the world is sleeping in, my older one gets to the rink at 5:30 AM. It seems like a cruel joke to play on the old

Football season ends today

I haven’t cared about the NFL for a very long time, probably since Mike Ditka was coaching the Bears. So I take my football in smaller doses, usually at the college level. This year, it has also included my high school alma mater, for the first time since I graduated high school. Life can take

After the purple sunset

October 5 seems like such a long time ago. On that date, I had high hopes for Northwestern’s football team, which was unbeaten and ranked in the national polls. I had written an exuberant piece for Five Wide Sports a few days earlier, about how it wasn’t 1989 anymore for the two sports teams I

You gotta have fun

My writing output in this space has fallen off a bit lately. Some of that is because ideas are getting sent to other places, and some of it is that baseball seems to animate my writing somewhat. I recently gave myself three months off from writing forThroughTheFenceBaseball, because I torture myself enough thinking about and

Hoping for a rematch

Having been at last night’s game between the Northwestern Wildcats and the Ohio State Buckeyes, it was a great game but a difficult loss to swallow. And now I have to change my Rocky metaphors when thinking about the rest of Northwestern’s season. I wrote something to the effect of Northwestern’s two-week period leading up

Quarterly report #8

It’s now been over two years since I’ve been writing this blog. It’s been a time capsule of my life, and the more I do it, the more comfortable it becomes. As I sometimes do in this space, now’s a time to look back, and try to see what lies ahead, too. I passed 1,000

A new outlet

I’m happy that FiveWideSports will be carrying some of my thoughts and writings, beginning with this piece that appeared on their site today. I’m still writing for ThroughTheFenceBaseball, and I have a piece appearing there today, as well. The writing is all Cubs and baseball-related, and a week from now their season will be done.

Gonna wait now

Northwestern now has two weeks to prepare for their game against Ohio State on October 5. While the Buckeyes have to deal with a should-be-undefeated Wisconsin team next weekend, Northwestern will have the week off to chop wood and climb mountaintops (metaphorically speaking). The planets are aligned for Northwestern on this one. It looks to me

The world has turned

Mine wasn’t the first undergraduate class to experience a winless football season at Northwestern, when they went 0-11 during my senior year of 1989. The team was also winless in 1978, 1980, and 1981, and just missed it in 1977 and 1979, as well. The late 1970s and early 1980s seem to be the true

The Cats and the Cubs

I’ve been a Cubs fan since the mid 1970s, and graduated from Northwestern at the dawn of the 1990s. I  would go so far as to say that my interest in sports begins and ends with those two teams. So today’s announcement that Northwestern athletics will play some of their home games in football, baseball,

’13 seems lucky so far

Northwestern won its first bowl game of my lifetime today, in a rather convincing fashion. They beat Mississippi State 34-20 in the Gator Bowl (I’m not using the corporate sponsor’s name here) to get the new year off to a winning start. The monkey has been sent away, the streak has been broken, and any

We’re halfway there

It’s halftime in the Gator Bowl, and Northwestern’s in the lead 13-10. A pick six in the first minute of the game got things going, and three interceptions on defense were a big help. An offensive touchdown would have been nice, but holding the Bulldogs to a field goal inside the red zone is the

What would I do without coffee?

Not much to say here, just an observation as I enjoy the first of many, many cups I will have this year. Looking forward to the Northwestern game, even if I don’t have the cable package to watch the game. I guess radio and Twitter will just have to do it for me, instead. Happy

Link to a piece on ChicagoSideSports

It’s all over but the bowl game now. The college football season was exciting, but ultimately disappointing for me as an alumus of Northwestern University. Not one, not two, but three games got away from the Wildcats, and that’s why there’s no game to look forward to this weekend. That’s why this feels more like

Big house, Big game

I’m not much of a football fan, but baseball has finished up its season, and I don’t care much for basketball, so it looks like football will have to do. And when I say “football” I really mean college football, because the NFL  isn’t too exciting for me, either. I’ve never been to a game

A year that stood out

On my way home from work today, I filled up the tank of my Prius at a gas station out in the suburbs. The Prius is one way to cope with the gas prices, since a fill-up runs about $25 at the most. With the minivan, it’s usually a lot more than that. A bigger

The year that the world changed

There have been a couple of times where I have found a penny on the sidewalk, picked it up, and used the date on that penny as a jumping off point for a post in this space. And so it was today, as I was visiting Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History. I hadn’t been

The magic numbers are 63 and 19

Last summer, my daughters were in a summer camp where they put on a musical performance at the end. My younger daughter sang “3 is a magic number” from the Schoolhouse Rock videos. She was amazing, of course, and I’m thinking about her and that song as I’m typing out this post. The magic numbers

Ending two bad streaks

I just returned from a one-day trip into the heart of Michigan country, Ann Arbor. I wore, as I often do, a purple Northwestern hat, but not with the intention of making any point about my school. It’s just a hat that I’ve been wearing for many years–decades, even–and am comfortable with. But I was

The best game I ever saw

I’ll never forget the first time I became aware of Northwestern’s football team. It was in the fall of 1982, so I would have been a freshman in high school. The announcers during one of the game breaks said “They’re going crazy up in Evanston, because Northwestern’s got the lead late in the game.” It seemed