Perfection is in a moment. It is not static. It is a fleeting experience. Perfection is a painting hanging on the wall that somebody observes and passes by. Perfection is not a word we can use often.
Last February, I was given the opportunity to visit LSU’s locker room, walk through the chute, touch the Win Bar, and enter a silent Tiger Stadium. It never rains there, of course, but it was cloudy and gray that day. Welcome to Death Valley, the sign said. I believed it. And I believed this team would become champions again.
I did not believe it would only take 10 months.
On New Year’s Eve 2012, I sat with my brother in our dilapidated townhouse and watched a listless team get kicked to the curb by an elated Clemson squad. We’d started 2012 sleeping off the bitter denial of a national championship game shutout in an even more dilapidated Lakeside tenement.
The Clemson loss, even more than the Alabama shutout, marked the beginning of a decline that lasted most of the decade. Often touching greatness without grasping it, these Tigers would pour their hearts out onto the field but were unable to beat Bama nor vindicate the program with a championship.
Then a homegrown new coach restored pride in 2016. 2017 brought humility. 2018 touched that greatness again, ringing like a distant bell. And then came 2019.
“I don’t think a lot of people are used to LSU scoring 40, 50, 60 points a game,” Joe Burrow said in the preseason, burnishing the reputation of the nation’s offensive punchline.
And then they punched touchdowns into the endzone of every team they faced. The legend is well known now, and most of it came on the road: 3rd-and-17 in Austin; Roll Tide What?™; mangling a succession of top-5 teams in Atlanta and New Orleans.
Alabama is the game that mattered more than any of the others. The season began and ended in Tuscaloosa. The Tigers sauntered in and dropped 46 on them, more points than any team has ever scored there in regulation. In the truer-than-he-realizes words of Jason Kirk: “They haven’t known fear since [46-41] happened.” They threw off the crimson yoke, and then they finished plowing the field anyway.
Success this century was imperfect: In 2003, they won a title with a single loss; in 2007, they won it with two losses; in 2011, they smelled perfection before having the cloche lifted to reveal nothing but wisps of steam. But in 2019, they feasted.
Then they danced on the carcass.
Like I wrote last winter, I concede it might just be a game. Already, coaches and players are moving on to the next stages of their professional lives, good memories of their championship season tucked away like snacks in picnic baskets. Maybe it’s just football.
Maybe it’s not. Try telling that to the generations of Louisianans, from Grand Isle to Ida, crying together over the outcome of a game. They won’t get mad; they’ll pity you, shaking their heads because you just don’t get it.
Tell it to the teeming thousands in the Superdome. We roared alongside the head coach, Bebe from the bayou. He vindicated himself to the country in the one state that can truly understand him, an hour from his hometown, in the very same building where our world had tilted off of its axis in January of 2012.
Fans leaving the Superdome entered a New Orleans concealed in fog yet clear as a sunny spring day. We walked, danced, and stumbled into a shrouded midnight in America’s most haunted place, a city alight with smiles and joy.
We had seen perfection.
On the way home, those gray skies finally opened up over Lecompte, right as I passed the exit for Lea’s Lunchroom, an oasis in the pine desert of I-49. We shared a ham lunch there years ago on a shambling trip home after a win over the Aggies.
The raindrops battered my windshield, but this time I did not shed a tear.
I am both over and very much not over losing my brother.