Football weather

Down here "football weather" is a lie we tell together. The rest of the country gets crisp air and flannel. We get ninety degrees, a heat index that reads like a typo, and a stadium full of people pretending their sweet tea isn't sweating harder than the linemen.

And we wouldn't trade it.

I wrote a baseball song last spring called "Hometown Nine," about the little rituals of a ballgame night — the peanuts, the organ, the kid catching a foul ball. It's quietly become one of my favorites in the catalog because it isn't really about baseball. It's about a whole town showing up for the same thing at the same time, which is rarer and more valuable than it sounds.

So with the season kicking off, I've been writing its sibling. A Friday night song. Drumlines and cowbells, tailgates and coolers, the student section louder than the PA. Nine take the field in one song; eleven in the other. I won't say more than that yet, except that it has the best one-line joke about Florida autumn I've managed to write, and that it already sounds like stadium lights coming on.

If you've got a hometown team — high school counts, high school especially counts — this one's being written for you.