What makes a grown man do jumping jacks in his living room at midnight?

Two words.  College football.

It was the fourth quarter of the UNC/LSU game.  After falling down by 20 points, our team was making a great comeback.  Maybe the players heard something that Kirk Herbstreit said from the broadcasting booth.  He'd been the one all week saying that we could rally together and have a chance to win.  We'd been reminded all night of the issues our program faced with the suspended players.  We'd made every dumb mistake possible in the game (2 of our first 4 offensive plays were fumbles) but somehow we were driving to win the game.

Back to my impromptu exercise routine that had broken out in my living room.  It was nearing midnight, and the rest of the family was long asleep.  At least some of them were.  I'd just ran into the bedroom and woken up my wife to let her know of the epic comeback that was taking place on my TV screen.  After realizing the house was not on fire, our child had not been kidnapped, and we were not being robbed, her heart was able to return to some semblence of a normal rhythm.  Apparently, she didn't like being woken up from a dead sleep all circumstances considered.  I felt like a blue-clad Paul Revere alerting the masses of the things going on while they slept.

As I've mentioned before, I get a little excited during sporting events.  Two fourth quarter touchdowns and an LSU fumble when they were trying to ice the game had given Tarheel nation hope.  As the Tarheels drove down the field with less than 1 minute to go, I found myself jumping up and down as T.J. Yates completed pass after pass to seemingly wide open receivers.  I couldn't yell and scream because my 3-year old was asleep.  So the extra excitement that couldn't be audibly released somehow turned the jumping around into full-out jumping jacks.  I'm sure it looked silly, but who cares, our offense was moving the ball like I've never seen.

Unfortunately, 2 straight passes were dropped in the end zone to end the game.  Final score, 30-24.

I can't watch commercials during high drama sporting events in which my team is playing.  So in the fourth quarter, I would flip channels just to pass the 2 to 3 minutes during commercial breaks.  Somehow that was easier than watching the commercials.  I kept going back to TNT which was showing Titanic.  It was the end of the movie (spoiler alert) where the ship was going down.  I kept thinking to myself at that time when we were down 20 points in the fourth quarter that our season and program as a whole could be like that ship.  Full of promise but arrogance and poor decisions would dereail the trip.  Oh how true that may turn out to be.  John Blake "resigned" yesterday from UNC's football staff.  He was at the center of all the controversy and his fingerprints appear to be all over the evidence.  I'm hoping that was just the glancing blow to the ship that is our football program.  But who knows what other damage is below the surface that could inflict more carnage.