Where was I when he Stumbled and Fumbled?

I remember it quite well. My dad was sitting on the couch, hogging up most of it as he tends to do (not that me and my older brother ever complained — the few feet of floor between the TV and that old thing, a couch we’ve since replaced with a more “modern” style one, one that doesn’t quite have the same squishiness of the old Family chair, were the real prime spots, that or dragging a chair in from the dining room to sit at a 30 degree angle from the TV) and he was shaking his head, muttering about how it’d been one hell of a year, at least.

Me? I was splayed out in one of the few UT shirts I had at that time — this was before my dad got his big raise and moved from the factory to Headquarters for Hanes Clothing — on the floor of the house that I’m typing this up in right now. If I do my math correctly I was .. Uhm .. I’m 19 now, carry the 1, don’t divide by zero .. Crap, okay, I was a kid. (Despite what anyone will try to tell you, Computer Science is NOT a Math Major. Or I sure hope not here in a year once I’ll have to take Calculus II) Oh, wait, I was 9. Nine. Any of ya’ll remember football from when you were 9? I barely do. I remember that I knew Tennessee was going to win. The same way I knew that Santa existed, the same way I knew I was going to grow up and be an astronaut.

I remember when I lost that belief, that knowledge. It was one year when the Lady Vols played Duke in the Greensboro Colliseum. We had tickets to that game, nice seats, first level, about ten seats back and we had thomped Old Dominion the previous round. I think it was Old Dominion. We lost that game, but I remember staring at Chamiqua Holdesclaw (I’m horrible at spelling names and I don’t want to look up anything right now .. please forgive me Volunteer Gods! Don’t sic Eric on me, please!) with 1:30 left, down by I don’t know how much. And we left the game early. I don’t know how much we were down by but I remember saying “Oh, if we get a three, then a steal, then another three, then a quick steal, and another three ..” We lost, and that was when the absolute spark of that definite belief that my Vols would always win was lost too.

See, that’s why I think the 98 season is so mythical to me. Sure, I remember fleeting moments of games before that, but it was that season that I first remember enjoying football for what it was. And so many times they pulled games out, building my belief that dreams do come true. So it seemed destiny, to me, that Arkansas lost that game. It was the first time I remember my dad swearing infront of me — he was a deacon in our church at that time — when he jumped off of the couch and yelled “WELL GOD DAMN YEAH!”

So, if any of you know where on the map is Kernersville, North Carolina, you can be assured that there were three kids — one of them was 40 years old — running around outside waving a big tennessee flag that was bought from some store in Knoxville and was more than fifteen years old (my dad bought it his senior year at the school) that now hangs on one wall, proudly reading the words in golden thread “University of Tennessee | 1998 National Champions | The Team of Destiny "13 – 0” "