My eight-year-old and I have been bingeing our way through Little House on the Prairie for the past couple of months. I once joked to one of my college professors that that show was primarily responsible for my moral upbringing. I was kidding, but it was also kind of true, and so now I’m indoctrinating my most impressionable children.
Yes, you can predict almost everything about every episode. Carrie’s always going to fall down, Nellie’s always going to be nasty, and Mr. Edwards is always going to sing Old Dan Tucker.
And Pa is always going to lose his crop and press on anyway. We’re only three seasons in, and if memory serves, Charles has lost three crops already. The last one even caused him to sell his farm so he could move away from the present adversity in Walnut Grove back home where all of the troubled memories have been filtered out by time. Fortunately, the buyers just so happened to be the same people who’d made the mistake of selling the exact same place years ago and ended up backing out of the sale because they didn’t want the Ingalls to make the same mistake. Of course. Also, Charles finally realized that Walnut Grove was where all of his friends were. So he stayed, and he planted another crop, got back to work, and prayed another prayer for harvest.
Meanwhile, of course, Mary got sick and almost died, Carrie fell down a well and almost died, and Pa and the fine folks of Walnut Grove nearly went both dead and bankrupt trying to save and love everybody. It’s a hard life in the little house, but everybody always laughs and smiles and cries at the end.
I don’t know when we Vols fans are going to finally laugh and smile and cry tears of joy because we don’t have the foggiest idea when this episode is going to end. There is no playhead, no time-scrubber, no Kindle progress indicator. We can’t know how long this chapter is or how close to the end we are.
I do know that the crop just burned up again and memories of home are calling.
The Vols went to Gainesville Saturday hoping that some of the feel-goods from the Chattanooga game would translate into something competitive against the Gators. Tennessee was a 14-point underdog and had shown enough chinks in the armor in losses to Georgia State and BYU to relieve anyone of the burden of expecting to win in The Swamp, but one expectation was still alive and well heading into Week 4: Be competitive and show some improvement.
Hail. Fire. Drought. The crop’s gone. Again.
These Vols are not getting better. They lost 34-3 to the Gators. They had 12 first downs to Florida’s 25. Their fourth-year quarterback — who’s started most of his 24 games — passed for 107 yards and zero touchdowns with two interceptions before getting benched while the Gators rolled out a guy who’d never started before and who threw for 293 yards with two touchdowns anyway.
Tennessee made plenty of mistakes, but this one cannot be pinned on The Weirdness. This wasn’t 2018, where Tennessee was -5 in turnovers; they were only -1 yesterday and got beat even worse. I said on our podcast last week that I wanted to see last year’s game without the turnovers. Turns out, I didn’t want to see it.
So now, add to an embarrassing loss at home to a non-Power 5 team that was 2-10 last year and an overtime heartbreaker to BYU the loss of the hope that we can at least be competitive against our rivals this year.
That crop is gone. There will be no harvest of hope this year. All that’s left is figuring out how to get through the rest of this season and planning and preparing for the next. There can still be some happy moments this season, certainly, but those moments will have to come via secondary storylines.
There’s a happy ending in here somewhere. Alas, it’s probably not this season and there’s likely more adversity ahead. But eventually, everything will come together, Nellie will get her due, and we will have our harvest.
