It Will Never Get Better Than This

You are a supporter of the University of Miami, and that taste of fireplace ash that coats your mouth has not yet gone away. You spent what could have been one of the best nights of your life watching your Cinderella get her arse kicked by a better Cinderella, which in and of itself is a odd enough notion, and now the rest of the nation is doing the bragging-rights slide all over your living room floor. Not even the knowledge that your loyalty wager, Hurricanes plus 7.5, came in is of any solace, for it will be the saddest money you'll ever make. You can't even hate the other guy's quarterback because he is not only aggressively virtuous but also one of you. A one-score defeat has never felt more one-sided.

But there is always the blessing of schadenfreude, of finding a way to define Indiana in victory that can only be truly enjoyed if your are of sufficiently small mind and dark heart, and right now you're in no position to turn down any crumb of solace, even if it still has that sooty aftertaste. You woke up today knowing, absolutely knowing, that this is the best moment Indiana football will ever have, and that everything after this is anticlimactic, maybe even disappointing. There is no better feeling in the world than victory without the burden of expectations, even if you were the pregame favorite, and Indiana's climb from Indianahood is so spectacularly improbable and free of historical context that it can never be topped.

Everything they do from this moment will be measured against last night and be found wanting, because you can only be perfect after a century of nothing the one time. The 1969 New York Mets are still the best thing to ever happen to the Mets whether you were alive for it or not, and no, you may not use the "Well, I wasn't born in 1969" argument to make yourself feel better. The 1981 San Francisco 49ers who went from 2-14 to 6-10 to the Super Bowl are still the warmest memory that franchise has ever emitted. The 2016 Leicester City victory in the Premier League as a 5,000-1 shot is light years better than anything before or since. History does not give a salamander's damn about your birthdate, because it was going on before you showed up and will go on after you're stiff, unless of course Satan's emissary manages to irradiate the planet over fucking Greenland and takes us all out. There's only one first time, and get your mind out of the gutter, you creep.