A Palpable Anticipation of Fall

There’s a palpable feeling in Austin about this fall.

[Sign up for Inside Texas TODAY and get the BEST Longhorns coverage!]

I wear a sweat-stained burnt orange dad cap every single day. Since I live in Austin, I rarely get comments about wearing Longhorn gear. It’s ubiquitous—part of the uniform, the social fabric of the city, even with all its growth and change.

But last week I lost count of the number of times I was stopped in public by people who just wanted to talk shop, to share their excitement about the coming Longhorn season. It’s not like they knew me from Adam, they just saw the burnt orange, albeit the faded kind, and wanted to talk Steve Sarkisian, Ohio State and most of all, Arch Manning.

I walked into a restaurant to meet a buddy who just moved back home, and I was stopped by the guy cleaning tables.

“Hook ’Em Horns, man. You pretty ready for Arch Manning?” he said. We ended up talking Manning for two or three minutes. If he was ready for the spotlight, what he’ll be good at, his Heisman chances.

I finally got to my friend after telling the busboy goodbye, and he asked, “Do you know that dude?”

I was reminded of Eddie Murphy at the basketball game in Coming to America: “That’s just a man I met in the restroom.”

Austin’s love of the Longhorns runs deep, but it’s a comfortable type of affection. It’s like the love long-time married couples feel, or the kind you have with an old friend. There’s very little PDA—for better or worse. When there is, it has to be earned, because the love is being celebrated.

It’s not performative like the city’s fake relationship with Austin FC, where car flags and yard signs were put on display as a form of “look at me.” I love soccer, so I don’t mean to throw shade at the sport. But Austin FC feels like it was birthed from the same place as the people who write Lone Star 9-1-1: a fictional Austin that exists in some far-off California writer’s room, imagined as a hybrid between South Los Angeles and a Western cowboy town.

One of the best sports celebrations of my life came after Vince Young scored on 4th-and-5 against USC. My friends and I packed as many people as we could into my mother’s Ford Expedition and drove downtown to join the fray around campus. I’ve never seen so many people so thrilled to be stuck in traffic.

The upper deck of I-35 turned into a honkathon, cars’ horns blaring out the first few notes of The Eyes of Texas. The streets around the Capitol and the Tower were bumper-to-bumper with people experiencing collective euphoria.

[Order THE LONGHORN ALPHABET: Get your little Longhorns ready for Texas Football this Fall!]

That kind of party only comes after a long wait, like 36 or 20 years, finally being fulfilled.

I remember the buzz before that fall in 2005, so thick you could feel it. Even the burnt orange hats which usually went ignored stopped folks in their tracks to talk.