For Once…Nowhere Else
 
Friday afternoon. Sky Box. Fortunately the microphone removed from your face. 
 
You're looking out – kids dressed in gold. Makeshift bleachers filled with overheated but rabid Bear fans. Cheerleaders with tattooed gold necklaces around their neck. Security ropes providing an attempted bumper on this bumper pool table for at least containment.
 
Temporarily. 
 
You look around. Speakers and computers and clocks and microphones surround you like parenthesis. Coaches with roles – whether it's delivering drinks to the press box, manning the ticket gate, helping with refreshments, or just on call for whatever happens when a thousand or so invade our campus. 
 
A thought: You never for the life of you want to be an athletic director – though major props to Tony Watkins and his staff and all these security people for this. It's such wonderment how many people and arms and legs it takes to put on a simple non-region football game! 
 
You hear "Glory Days" in your head as you gather into this huge after-game huddle – that spans about 30 yards in an arc. Coaches stand in the back, kids with sweat and turf and blood all over them – yet smiling as if the potential Prom date said yes. 
 
Coach Nick Perotta talks, sums up, congratulates yet advises, praises yet propels. Cheerleaders are in a puppy huddle, leaning in. Parents are in the back – first glad their kid's okay, then giving that warm smile only a parent can do when all went well in junior-ville.  
 
Anyway, the football team just put up numbers almost matching a summer thermometer. The student body probably has lake houses to attend, but it can wait. Labor Day plans are on hold – you yourself have to type up six or eight paragraphs to try to make sense of all this. 
 
But sometimes – like a week ago in Athens – you just like to hang around a bit – let things linger. 
 
After all – life awaits. There will be motorists in front of you that don't know how to turn left on yellow, lines at Kroger, forms to fill out, proving you're not a robot on your computer, trying to get a human on the phone when making appointments. 
 
So many things...

Therefore, you bask in your good while it's here – and listen to Ferris Buehler's words when he spoke of life moving around pretty fast. You have to slow down sometime to take it all in. 
 
Therefore, you stand between coaches and players and students and drum liners and cheerleaders and parents and siblings. There are cameras and sports tape and Gatorade cups and the smell of sweat all around you.  
 
And for now – you can even tell your own friends and even ChatGPT itself to leave you the heck alone. 
 
All is okay right now. With that, you laugh and linger and loiter. Words and sentences, periods and commas can wait. 
 
You hug a sweaty player, laugh with a proud mom, stand at the goalpost. 
 
And look out. And for once – in no hurry whatsoever to be anywhere else, because normally wherever you are not is the place to be.  
 
With this said, you just stand there.  
 
And it's a great feeling – knowing your heart, spirit, body, soul, and mind are all in the same place.  -           
 
   Dunn