During the Olympics, Londoners accustomed to rainy summers reacted to warm weekdays by leaving their offices and basking in the nearest park, creating the unusual juxtaposition of wing-tips and pale chests. And that was just the women.
We value what is scarce, so Minnesotans should be performing the sporting version of shedding ties and button-downs to soak in the sun. In a sports landscape that has resembled the pictures being sent home by the Mars Rover, the last few days have provided the kind of relief one feels when an LMFAO song ends.
Fans work so hard at being fans. They invest countless hours and dollars, and the return on those investments, in major sports in the Twin Cities the past two years, has been what athletic trainers like to euphemistically call "flu-like symptoms."
So, for a few days, we should smell the roses without counting how many decades the Gophers narrowly have missed qualifying for the Rose Bowl.
The Gophers are 2-0. You can't read too much into a victory over the New Hampshire School of Cosmetology, but you can read about it without laughing, which is progress.
As easy as it would be to dismiss victories over the UNLV Rebels and the Hampshire Hamsters, Louisiana-Monroe just beat Arkansas and Appalachian State once won at Michigan. Surviving lesser teams is part of the challenge of playing major college football.
Winning two games with a young roster at the start of his second season also makes Jerry Kill's meeting rooms feel less like dungeons and more like those fun science labs where they let you blow stuff up.
After victories, Kill said, "the coaching seems to be better because their morale is better. When you don't win, and you get after them, they feel like they get beat down a bit."
