What a long, strange summer it's been.
Duke Basketball died when Elliot Williams moved closer to home, then, it came back to life, all because Andre Dawkins decided to leave home. Oh, and Greg Paulus is starting. In football. At Syracuse.
Next thing you know, Coach K will have more bigs than guards.
It's tempting to get tangled up in this culture of immediacy-The sky is falling! No! Wait! The sky's the limit!-but instead, let's time-travel to the unrefined complications of yesteryear and, while we're at it, switch the sport to football. Also, we're thousands of meters up in a cerulean sky, surrounded by the peaks of the Swiss Alps.
That's where I was two summers ago, surrounded by a pack of Duke students, hiking Chamonix Mont-Blanc and, somehow, debating whether David Cutcliffe would lead Duke to a bowl in his first season.
In retrospect, the prospect seemed about as likely as the sun not singeing my skin. But then, the interlude from a season's final buzzer and the next year's opening kickoff is a surging tide of optimism. Suddenly, by August, a team known for its graduation rate can be angling for a bowl bid. Our expectations were as high as the summit.
It wasn't just the altitude making me delirious. Wild dreaming is the purpose of summer, isn't it? Even in the doldrums of suburbia, it's all too easy to mentally transform that dull 8:45 a.m. lecture into the one that will change your world.
A week into the school year, it will be the same dreaded chore as always. Once, though, it held promise. It always does.
Again, this was last summer. That is, before a football game replaced Tailgate as the day's main event-or, at least, provided a reasonable nightcap for some. Cautious optimism was the most anyone would cede the Blue Devils, yet for some reason, here we were, halfway around the world, already anticipating a game with a bowl bid on the line.
It never materialized. Still, even the knockout punch didn't stop people from speculating about Duke's first bowl berth since 1994; the lull lasted about as long as my sunburn. There's always next year! And Cutcliffe, an optimist by nature, is the one leading that charge up the mountain.
"I have said this: I believe we will be a bowl team," he said at the end of July, at the tail end of the dog days and right before the start of training camp. "I believe we are capable of being that. I think my job is to coach them to that level. Is any of that easy? No. Every hurdle gets a little higher on this race, but that's exciting to me.... The bigger the hill, the more fun you have in accomplishing those things."
Which brings us back to that treacherous hike, the one for which we needed conversation to serve as distraction. Our thighs burned and our calves ached, and after the first few minutes, we were already dehydrated. It was like just another game in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
So we talked about football, and, really, we talked about Duke. The summer was about to end-we all knew that-and soon, our glorified exaggerations would come crashing down to sea level. Duke probably wasn't going to a bowl game. Chances are, it won't make one this year, either.
But until Sept. 5-or until the Blue Devils lose for the first time-who knows?
So while you can, let those imaginations run wild with visions of bowl games and bonfires. After all, Greg Paulus is a starting quarterback.
Stranger things have happened.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.