Previously in this series: Business is Finished, by Ace Anbender

As you may be aware, Michigan won the national championship. Brian's said his bit on what this means to him, and now it's everyone else's turn. We're inviting everyone who's contributed to the blog over its existence to write whatever they want about the 2023 football team, and hope to roll out a series of these over the course of the next few months.

Next up is regular diarist/resident Michigan War Dad Desmond Was Tripped, who wrote a journal to accompany a many-drafted revision of the Better Son or Daughter 2009 Hype Video. Yes there are others, but by the powers invested in me in the name blog I name this one, which has an entire fool-hurdling sequence I might add, the official successor to the original. –Seth

The Video (link):

This entry will be a little bit of a departure from my normal content. Sure, I could do “Michigan Basketball at the Battle of Hattin” or “Juwan Howard and the Defense of Singapore”, but I wont. I want to pull the warmth of being National Champions one more time over my body, and say thank you the only way I know how to the man who made this blog. I’ll thank him by taking something he once made, and improving on it just a little bit. Brian thanked everyone in the marathon podcast (including me, I was touched), but I wanted to thank him.

So I convinced a friend of mine with far better technical skills and an enthusiasm unknown to mankind (who really took no convincing at all) to help me update Brian’s 2009 Magnum Opus. He has mentioned the 2009 hype video a lot, and how it opened with the disasters of 2008, but finishes with some optimism: a hope that maybe Michigan would pull itself out of the morass of mediocrity it found itself in.

[After THE JUMP: we will all go down together]

But it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t in 2009, or 2010, and despite a promising 2011, it would regress in 2012 again. We struggled, and endured, and prayed that, like the song says, our ship would come in. But long was our watch and long did we wait in seemingly unyielding vain, even through years of our Roland come home to rescue us, we waited. We suffered defeat after heart breaking defeat… until we didn’t.

Brian sat through it all. Continuing to generate content, continuing to not only watch the team he loved fail on game day, but watch it over and over throughout the week. No one deserves this more than Brian. He kept us involved, he helped our brains try to make sense of the disasters we were seeing, and he kept us feeling like it wasn’t just us, alone with a black pit of negative expectations.

I didn’t see much of the 2008 season. I had been in the stands for The Horror, but was in Iraq when the 2008 season began. Still, I listened to the Toledo game on the radio, and pushed a mission to listen to parts of the Ohio State game, but after 2008 the strain began to take its toll. I stopped feeling connected to most things I had once loved, and I no longer believed that there was any good left in the world. It was an incredibly dark time in my life, and with the war showing no signs of coming to a close, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. It is a difficult feeling to describe, being present and yet not. Being around the people you should love, and who love you, but not really being there at all. To watch the things you once loved go on without you, and not caring at all that they passed you by.

It was around this time that I found MGoBlog. I had been gifted a desk for a brief period, and spent entire days (sorry taxpayers) hitting refresh on the page to see if there was new content. It got so bad that MGoBlog appeared in a briefing on a list of unclassified sites “most visited by members of the organization”. One of the things you learn when you come face to face with the finite nature of life is that you don’t waste time on garbage. Almost every other source of college sports content was just that. Garbage. But not MGoBlog. It was content. Quality content. And I was there for it. I watched a few games on television, but could never bring myself to go back to a place that had brought me such unmitigated joy as a child and as a young man. I couldn’t let whatever was in me get in there.

In 2011, after another deployment, I forced myself to go back to a game. I thought “if that Brian dude can suffer through it, so can I”. So I went. Western Michigan. It was easy, and fun, and beautiful. A week later I was in Afghanistan again.

I missed the 2011 win against Ohio State, and caught the 2012 season opening loss to Alabama transiting through Bagram. But it didn’t matter. Adrift in a sea of sardonic fatalism, the one pillar of hope I had was Michigan Football. Even if I held out no optimism for myself, I held it for the forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe, we would be Champions again. Though I couldn’t always watch the game, I could eventually read about it on MGoBlog. MGoBlog was my connection to the world that I had let leave me behind.

After that deployment something changed. Despite still feeling detached from everyone and everything I once knew, some of my friends from the house on S Forest asked me to come to their tailgate. With their families there. Piece by piece, Michigan football, my one attachment to my former self was pulling me back into the folds. One tailgate turned into two, and then every home game, and before I knew it years had gone by and we were all watching Michigan get destroyed by Wisconsin huddled around my tablet in the lobby of some hotel on vacation in Croatia. Because we had become a family.

I saw Brian’s 2008 video for the first time this year, and it brought me back to all of those days I had pushed back into the darkest recesses of my mind. It reminded me that my life, like the life of so many others, could always be redeemed. It reminded me of a time that I honestly thought there was nothing tying me to this world that I was likely destined to leave soon anyway. I don’t recognize that person anymore. Just like I don’t recognize that Michigan team anymore. They, like myself have evolved into something better.

But never alone. I couldn’t have done it without the great people here, and my tailgate (and my regular) family. We could have all given up and done something more productive with our Saturdays. But we stayed and I was with a few of them in Houston, finally Champions. We had endured the highs and the lows and we had come through to the other side together… where we saw that our ship had finally come in. I got to experience all of that, I got to go and sit back in the season tickets my grandfather secured us nearly forty years ago and become friends with the people around us who knew him. More importantly I got to bring my daughter to her first Michigan tailgate (Indiana week, rain in October, do not recommend).

I got to do all of this because MGoBlog kept my love of Michigan Football burning, and Michigan Football kept me going. There aren’t enough thank you’s in the world, but I’ll just say that I’m glad we all waited for that ship to come in together.

Go Blue!