For the past three days, I have made loose references to the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask with the titles of my posts on the site. Mostly, I did it because it’s a bespoke meme about anticipating a catastrophic, major event. I also wasn’t feeling that creative, but that’s a digression.
This is about good and evil.
If you didn’t know, the countdown and sense of foreboding are critical to the game itself. It’s a tale as old as time, but reimagined with a heightened sense of anxiety. Majora, an evil mask that possessed the imp who stole it, seeks to crash the moon into the world. You, as the hero Link, embark on a time-traveling, swashbuckling adventure to stop it, repeating the same three days on loop to change the course of history. As each day begins, and the moon encroaches, the game tells you how many days remain until the apocalypse.
72 hours. 48 hours. 24.
Eventually, of course, the unlikely hero wins. He vanquishes a reprehensible, corrupting evil, and saves the world. The crunch of time and the pressure of the moon (with its horrifying, angry face!) hold less and less weight as the hero becomes more self-assured and learns more skills on his time-loop quest.
Without getting too deeply into the plot of this game — or any of the other high fantasy-driven, and thus convoluted, games in the series — what I’m trying to impart about Majora’s Mask is this: impenetrable evil finds a way. It persists through time, space, dimension. “Good” can certainly defeat it, of course, but it takes unlikely heroes, the rare few who’ve not picked up the haunted object and let untold power consume them. The clock ticks down and disaster comes for all of us, unless someone or something truly exceptional finds a way.
This is about good and evil, but this is also about football.
It feels like some of you want me to tell you that Michigan is the brave hero, rejecting the inevitability of another failure on the national stage to vanquish foes, both literal and narrative-based. I wish I could sell that to you, but I can’t. You and I know that. If you still believe in this, there are plenty of other writers to read who will feed you that.
It is, in fact, Washington who’ll don the mantle of protagonist. Michael Penix Jr.’s story has captivated most of the country, uniting Hoosiers, Huskies and Buckeyes alike under a regal purple banner. Even neutral observers care about Washington football proving itself exceptional in order to end Michigan’s arrogance, once and for all.
There’s no better team to do this, both on an individual, team-versus-team level, and within the grander scheme of our dying sport. Alex Katson argued on this very website that Washington might represent the last bastion of college football as we know and love it:
…as a neutral observer, consider your rooting interests on Monday. Would you rather take the fond memory of what this sport used to be – the team with storylines that feel like they belong in college and not the NFL, with a staff that cares about mentoring young men and not about where their next check is coming from?
Or would you rather take the manifestation of the eldritch horror the sport is becoming, the team thrice eulogizing a man eating a well-done steak in a hotel 10 minutes away to try to convince you they have the culture abundantly and clearly present on the other sideline?
… In 2023, the Huskies are uncontaminated. Every other program in the soon-to-be Power Four has already moved on to fielding an NFL team with coaches who will be at their fifth school in five years by 2027. A Washington win on Monday would be the last, gasping breath of God’s intended college football.
I could go on a tangent about how Michigan is not some “eldritch horror.” The “Free Harbaugh”-type eulogies to which Alex refers are just a small slice of the pie when it comes to actual feel-good stories out of Ann Arbor. Mike Hart became (however briefly) the first Black head coach in program history. Blake Corum returned to the program triumphantly after an injury that put him on the sidelines last fall. Sherrone Moore coached through a gauntlet. Hell, if Washington’s team, as Alex argues, lacks stars, Ari Wasserman argued Michigan is built the same way!
Still, let’s play along for a second. Time is running out to defeat the big, bad Michigan Wolverines and the end of the football world they signify. And you all think Washington is the team to do it? Pick better heroes.
Rooting for 2023 Michigan is like making a bargain with a cursed artifact. If we accept its embrace, it offers us a spot at the top of the mountain we’ve longed for for almost 30 years. In exchange, because Michigan is a group of dirty cheaters, we must sacrifice a part of the sport itself; we’ll allow the moon to crash into the sporting world and (apparently) extinguish whatever light is left.
It’s a bargain many Michigan fans have made, and you know what? It’s been going fine so far. The team got caught in an unprecedented cheating scandal… and yet, they’re still here. Suspensions did not matter. They’re still around. Day in and out, neutral observers and fierce rivals await justice against Harbaugh and company. The Big Ten and NCAA are trying! And yet, the day has not yet arrived. The moon is creeping closer and closer to earth, spelling out oblivion, and a Michigan win is that disaster manifested.
Since this disaster hasn’t been mitigated off the field, fans have put faith in Kalen DeBoer’s (apparently) ragtag squad of heroes to seek justice on it. Not only is a national championship on the line, but karmic retribution itself, apparently.
Seems like a lofty burden to bear if you’re Washington, who has only narrowly escaped defeat time in and out. Their receivers (who I do love, by the way) cannot keep catching balls like they do, especially against the best defense they have seen all season. Dillon Johnson is not the type of running back who can make the game dangerous. It only takes a little leverage on the Huskies’ interior to fuck with Penix’s sacred pocket protection. Washington is lucky, not exceptional. Luck does not defeat an evil as pernicious as Michigan.
As for Michigan, I see no burdens here. Neither the team, nor we as fans, need worry about what a Michigan win means for Michael Penix’s legacy or for the sport at all. In fact, it’s freeing, in a way. We’re clawing back where we belong, fairness be damned. Evil does not consider the damage it does around it; we, as its acolytes, aren’t the ones paying the price. I do not need to place my hopes in some unlikely hero; the malignant, maize-and-blue force with which I’m aligned is restoring what’s ours. In this deal with the Devil, that’s all I need.
I’ve said it before and will again: I know the day of retribution will come, and I (and many of you) could soon suffer for our alliance with the unholy Jim Harbaugh and Michigan football. If it’s not from NCAA punishment, it’ll be in Harbaugh leaving. Or, perhaps, in a down year as the conference expands, and new challengers approach.
But, if Michigan’s victory is a harbinger of the end of the football world, it’s none of my concern right now. Like Skull Kid donning the sinister mask that possess him, I’m living in the hedonistic here-and-now. I want the moon to crash into the earth and cause the rest of you incessant anguish, because that means my team won.
A Washington team ascribed godlike exceptionalism is the only thing in the way, given hero status in a reality where heroes rarely win. Unlike Link, though, Washington cannot turn back time, learn and relearn lessons, or save the game before facing Michigan’s villainy. The doomsday clock ticks down for Washington — and apparently, most of you — only once.
In other words, if you’re looking for a hero, you’re not getting one tonight.