Fall ball: Dancing with the Ducklings

Forget about calendars. To me, fall starts with the mid-August return of crickets.

On my spacious 3/4-acre ranch, the cricket symphony is a welcome natural phenomenon. It almost makes me forget vandals with hooves.

Yes, the animal kingdom provides plenty of magical moments. The two does and five fawns visiting the other evening were not one of them. The beasts attacked the fledgling raspberry bushes and innocent young apricot tree and were so slow to retreat from their feast I could practically tackle them.

The crickets and marauding deer also ring in the season of football. Crisp days. Low-angle light. Televised disasters in high def involving my Ducks versus Boise State on the Smurf Turf.

Just looking at the blue field in Boise, I got a sinking feeling. The Duck players must have felt the same way as “the water” grabbed at their legs.

Think impending doom.

Every year I cling to the irrational notion that the Ducks will become the best team in the country. That’s true even if such an outcome is as unlikely as getting hit in the head by a meteorite. Perhaps you’re similar. Heroes must be chosen carefully.

This year’s Duck football team gave their fans the equivalent of a sporting root canal or a gridiron colonoscopy. The season opener was brutal. The Ducks, an offensive juggernaut a year ago, got few first downs and little yardage. By halftime they looked as if they were engaged in a mass group panic.

They looked like Ducks in the headlight.

I may get worked up over the University of Oregon, which I graduated from back in the Pleistocene era.

But I am not as big a football fan as the Wonder Woman.

If I want to get her attention during “the season,” I stand in the middle of the living room.

“Is it important enough to block the front of the TV?” the Wonder Woman asks.

Usually, it’s not.

The Wonder Woman takes after her mother, for whom New Year’s Day was the biggest holiday of the year. She’d wait on the family the rest of the year, very happily. But New Year’s Day was her day of rest, if you can call extreme excitement over the games rest.

The Wonder Woman, likewise, is not conventional. She rather enjoys the hysteria of a big game. When she thinks formidable makeup, she pictures Seattle Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselback painting black lines under his eyes to reduce glare.

If she gets misty, it’s probably because her beloved OSU Beavers have lost a game.

Football is important. But it is entertainment. No matter what, fans need to frame every so-called disaster, whether it is in football or something more important like a job or health crisis, in these words: In five years, will this matter?

Like the crickets and hooved vandals, the Quack Attack will be back. It might take five years but ...

Reach the author at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it