Primal Hope / Primal Fear

BobLee
June13/ 2014

I can’t keep pace with the verbal ping pong between Rashad McCants and RoyzBoyz.   WWI trench warfare with each side lobbing Big Bertha shells at one another.

Let us consider a dare-we-speak-of-it destination of all this.  Where one side gleefully Hopes it might lead.  Where the other side dreadfully Fears it might lead.

The oft-referenced ABC (AnybodyButCarolina) crowd is like that other much-cussed bunch so unpopular along picturesque Franklin Street.  The Tea Party – with no formal organization or central HQ or identified spokesperson.  Both groups despised and the mythical source of all evil.

I know many life long NC State, Duke, Wake and ECU fans/alumni who cannot mouth the words “Tar Heels” (TWO words) or UNC without garnishing those nouns with a handful of paint-peeling adjectives.   Yet, when asked if they are ABCers, recoil as if asked if they eat kittens.

Is ABCer a term of derision?    I see it as simply a collective noun used for brevity’s sake.  No one who reads this site would ever be one.   Of course not (wink, wink).

ABCers in the context of this smoldering dumpster fire now going on five years, are akin to sadistic rubberneckers who gather on the street as a distraught goober crawls out on a high rise ledge contemplating swan-diving himself into local lunatic lore….. screaming “Jump You Fool Jump” and taking odds on whether he’ll land headfirst or not.

By noon on Day One five years ago it was obvious that Butch-ers Footballers were holding a smoking gun and bragging that it had just shot itself in the foot.   How deep the corruption might lead beyond Young Marvin’s posse was unclear but there were already a few cries of “Forget football….. check their basketball program for GSR”.   GSR is forensic crime lingo for gunshot residue.

Tom O’Brien was beating Butch-er like a rented mule.  Blowing up that program would be fine but sights were adjusted upward to The Rafters in Dean’s Dome.

Thus began the mantra of Rafters – Banners & Roy as incremental targets.

From Rafters – Banners & Roy it is only one small step…. but one giant leap for generations of verbally tormented ABCers around the world.   One giant Amphibious leap.

That one giant leap is The Primal Hope and The Primal Fear that has been growing like cancerous kudzu in the animal brains of both ABCers and the besieged TruBlues.

DEAN

Could an incriminating evidence trail ever lead to DEAN?

“Absolutely” say the ABCers in unison.

“Nope… No Way… Ain’t agonna happen… Never… Don’t even think such a thang”  insist the TruBlues in unison.

The same TruBlues who have so stridently insisted:  Marvin acted alone…. the parking tickets ae “all there is”….. Jennifer The Tutor is a space alien….. it’s all Dan Kane’s fault….. Mary Willingham is Maleficent.

With every peel of this odious onion the evidence trail moves inexorably along like the laying of track for the Union Pacific.   When it gets to Promontory Point will the golden spike be driven thru The Legend of DEAN?

A considerable leap away for sure….. but not as considerable a leap as it was 5 – 4 -3 -2 -1 years or six months or two weeks ago.  How close a month from now?

Such a cataclysmic event would incite a Brickyard Bonfire and a major clean-up mess along Raleigh’s Hillsborough Street….. the burning of more than a few benches on a certain West Durham campus…. a lot of Yee Haas, Yippees and YaHoos by multi-generations of maligned non-Tar Heel fans.

What about in The County of Orange…. and wherever The Legend lives?   How might those 8,000,000 Chinese fans take such news?

To any living Tar Heel of any age or mental condition, the mere thought of DEAN being less than The Most Holy Of All Holies is unthinkable.  Chapel Hill’s equivalent to debunking Christmas & Easter.  No virgin birth in a manger.   Certainly no Resurrection.   To be religiously politically correct – Mohammed reduced to a tent preacher and Buddha just a chubby little statue.

Every long-held truth of every TruBlue called into question.   TA McLendon’s knee did not touch the ground.   Dudley Bradley did hit Clyde The Glide with a tire iron.   There were 26 men blocking for Gio on that punt return and everyone of’em hit a State player in the back.  …… Charles Kuralt was a fraud.  No one ever read Look Homeward Angel.

What’s next?  The Old Well as North Carolina’s first Fracking site ??
Actually THAT is already in the plans.

A very very loyal double degreed UNCer of some renown and I were chatting last month.   I posed the scenario by which the whole Dome o’ Cards comes atumbling down.  DEAN revealed as:  another coach who, under intense pressure to win, did what he convinced himself he had to do.   He must be in the right because…. well because he was HE!

My friend, both a practical man and a worldy fellow of no small repute, shook his head asking “That isn’t possible…. Is it?”

I said not a word tilting my head and raising an eyebrow quizzically.

“Well certainly it COULD”  answering his own question.   “THAT would simply be awful”  he concluded with a shiver of raw panic in his voice.

“In whose eyes?”  I noted.

The Most Primal of Hopes /  The Most Primal of Fears.

♦ ♦ ♦

I am, on occasion, accused of not taking “all this” seriously.  To which I – on behalf of all cancer patients, aborted babies, victims of genocide, child abuse and rape et al – …….. plead Guilty.  Oh and I was just kidding about fracking The Old Well.  Or was I?

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