A moral victory, but I digress.

Do you guys ever misuse phrases?  I'm starting to realize that I misuse a lot of phrases.  In my old age, I'm morphing into the bartender from Boondock Saints. I ended a long email rant the other day with, "but I digress."  I then started to think, "I'm not sure I used that correctly."  I often use this phrase to end impassioned soliloquies.  Kind of a "and that's what I think about that!" or "this is Kathy, signing off."  And it seems, that "I digress" doesn't mean either of these things.  I gathered from my extensive internet research (Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia) that it actually means, "I've gotten off topic, so let's refocus."  Here's the ironic thing: I get off topic ALL THE TIME.  You'd think I would know the proper phrasing for my condition.  I just needed to get that off my chest.  A little confession before we get to the meat of the story. Moving on...

As I watched the Oklahoma State game last Saturday, I could feel a pool of water gathering at my feet.  It wasn't because I peed my pants, it was the ice melting from my cold heart.  Alas!  There is hope after all.  After my last doom-and-gloom post about my bad attitude toward expectations of the season, I got several private messages telling me to shape up or ship out.

Well, don't worry friends.  Optimistic Kath is back. Sure, I suffered some regression and reverted to the 1990s Cowboy fan inside all of us.  I expected humiliation.  I anticipated disgust.  But the 'Boys came to play.  Could it be that we've cleared that hurdle?  Maybe the days of saying, "Oh well, there's always basketball season," are over.  Let's be honest, I'm the only one who still says that anyway.

I started thinking, maybe we've evolved past the team that just gets whipped, and instead we've become the team that always competes.  That's a good progression in my opinion.  We have moved from Michael Dukakis to Al Gore.  Although if we really were Al Gore, technically we would have won the game, just not been given credit.  Like OU against Oregon in 2006.  But I digress...  (I totally just used that right!)

A lot of people have referred to the Florida State game as a "moral victory."  I don't believe in moral victories.  You either win or lose.  And the variance of which it takes to get over losses is what I really focus on.  I got over this one pretty quickly.  Sure, I had that oh-so-familiar feeling during the game.  You know the one, where you think you might barf from nerves that this could really happen or it might all be taken away?  I feel ya, Al Gore.  I feel ya.

But I took a lot of positive things from our season opener.  There is hope.  And more importantly, there is fight.  And as a fan, that is all I can ask for.  Go out and fight each game.  And if you can come close to taking the opposing quarterback's head off, ala Emmanuel Ogbah, that'd be great too.