My mother always told me to leave a $5 in your winter coat pocket come March, so that when those first cold winds of late October rolled around, there'd be a nice surprise waiting for you the first time you wore the coat. Some years, I'd accidentally leave more than that, and find a $20. You think that was a dominant surprise to discover on a crisp autumn morning? You bet it was.
This year, when I took my coat of the closet during the second week of October on an unseasonably cold morning, I discovered no money. It got warm early last year, and the last time I wore my coat was March 20. You remember March 20, don't you?
There wasn't the traditional 5-spot in the coat this year. Because the last time I wore my coat was the night Miami beat Creighton on a phantom-foul call with 2.6 seconds left, the night Guillermo Diaz hit two free throws to go ahead 53-52, the night Dana Altman chased the referees out of the building as boos rained down. The night I spent that $5 on a pitcher of PBR with some buddies as we tried to discern what we'd just seen.
And so it was that on that second Tuesday in October, I broke out my coat for the first time, and didn't find a stash of cash to make the impending doom of winter seem less imposing. No, instead I found a ticket stub that read "NIT Second Round: Miami VS Creighton, March 20, 2006", and a roster sheet haphazardly folded in eighths. If you don't think that didn't send me into sports rage, like coming across NFL Films footage of the 1998 NFC Championship Game on ESPN, you don't know me. I was surly for practically the entire day. Not only was there no cash stash to get "free" lunch from BK, there was a stark, tangible reminder of how the night ended the last time I'd worn that coat.
Outside of finding a picture of an ex-girlfriend with a dear-john letter signed in pink lipstick on it in that pocket, there scarcely could have been anything worse. Talk about your all-time bad flashbacks to a bad night. I mean, finding a dead mouse in that pocket would have been more pleasant. Having a dead bat fall out when I picked it up, which actually happened to my buddy Kadavy, would have been preferable to finding a ticket stub to the Miami game.
I'm not sure where you'd classify that game on Bill Simmons "Stomach Punch" scale. But I know for sure that finding that stub six months later, when I was hoping for Rodeo Cheeseburger money, had to be roughly equivalent to Rocky Balboa waking up in a cold sweat six months after the Ivan Drago fight, having nightmares of the Big Russian beating his head in. That I'm sure of.
And so for me, the 2006-07 season began with a reminder of how 2005-06 ended. The 23rd ranked Jays began the task of erasing those memories on Thursday night in their first exhibition game. And it can't come soon enough.
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