For the first time in more than a month, Syracuse actually found a football team worse than they are – and we thank the kind folks in Winston-Salem North Carolina and Wake Forest University for the much needed ass-kicking they allowed us to give them yesterday. I don’t bring this up to rehash a sports event that I know nobody really cares about, but rather to mention how much I miss the olden days.

Back in the day, when SU won a football game on Saturday, I had to wait until Sunday in order to devour the newspaper sports section. Now with the Internet and online news sites, I’d already read everything there is to read – which is basically the lo-cal “paper” site and the same AP story recycled on ESPN, SI, USA Today, and the other national sites.

Of course, it’s not just Sundays during football season that I miss. There once was a time when I’d go out and get the local Sunday paper as well as the Sunday NY Times (and even the Daily News, more for the amusement factor than the news) and spend all Sunday drinking coffee (and smoking cigarettes and/or pot, back when I used to do that sort of thing), reading the papers, and doing the crossword puzzles.

Ah, those were the days. Not that there aren’t advantages to how things work today, of course. For one thing, I don’t have to fiddle with the shortwave radio to get the BBC or play with the rabbit ears to get the CBC news on Channel 11 from Kingston. But there was just something about sitting around amidst piles of newspaper that really took the edge off the end of the weekend.

The pot helped, too.