It is a time of beginnings across this great country. In winter, a new year starts. Spring renews nature’s cycle of life. But those who heed the academic calendar’s rhythms know the nervous yet exciting aura of potentiality a new school year brings, and understand that the transition from summer to fall might be the most powerful kickoff of them all. Not least because it means actual kickoffs: the return of sports, throughout all grade levels.
Yet in this time of beginnings, there also lingers a nagging sense of ending. No, it’s not that some nefarious legion of Tim Walzes is threatening once again to suspend sports for grade- and high-school students. It is, rather, that college sports — in which so many invest so much (figuratively and literally), by which so many remain attuned to the academic year and attached to institutions they might otherwise not much care for — have only just begun to experience changes that may render them unrecognizable, or perhaps end them completely, at least as we have known them. Should this happen, it would be a shame, for reasons I can personally attest.
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