Losing a Whole Year

I mean, it's kind of a metaphor (David Guralnick/Detroit News)

I probably should wait to write this, because right now, I genuinely feel like Michigan may never beat Ohio State again.  I don't see how it can happen.  I don't see a path forward.  I just see year after year of having to eat this.  They never go fallow.  They never get punished meaningfully.  They never suffer transition costs.  They just keep doing and doing and doing.  Michigan can come out and play reasonably good football and it will just keep getting smoked by Ohio State.  I don't see how it will ever be different.  I want to feel differently, I want to feel something that isn't meaningless existential dread at the end of every November.  I want this to be different and I genuinely do not feel like it ever will be because no one can explain to me how it can be.

I went into today believing that Michigan was likely going to lose this football game.  I had no real reason to believe that Michigan would win.  I sat surrounded by bro OSU fans who ran their mouths the whole game.  I just sat there, largely silent, wanting more than anything for this to be different and knowing that it wouldn't be.  This is a stupid feeling and I should have been more prepared for it, but here we are, hours later, and I am still just soul numbed.  I don't want to feel like this.  I don't want to be like this, so upset about the result of a college football game.  But because I wanted the joy of something going against the script, against the expected, the price paid is this feeling.

The only way Michigan had a chance to win this game was to play perfectly.  So when the first extra point play resulted in a bad hold and a miss, it pretty much was over, even if it was just the first possession.  The miscues were plentiful, the decisions occasionally maddening, but the same result happened one more time.

No one knows how to fix this, short of Ohio State being found guilty of massive NCAA violations, and even then, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to roll with it and go back to winning double-digit games every year.  Michigan may never beat Ohio State again and I don't know if knowing that is likely true is comforting or not.  (If you would like to share your rational and feasible plan for this to not be the case, please, by all means.  It still won't likely be enough.)