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Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes once queried, "What happens to a dream deferred, does it shrivel up and die?" And after many years of puzzling over this query, I've found the 21st century answer. In the world of sports, a dream deferred breeds a message board poster.  

Every young boy in my south grew up wanting to be a player on a top 25 college football team. This might be changing now that the south actually has NFL football, but when I was growing up in the southland the Tennessee Titans, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Carolina Panthers did not exist and Atlanta was the least interesting NFL team on the face of the earth.  Gradually this dream dies for all but a few of us to be replaced by other dreams that gradually die as well but take longer. Even for all-state athletes like the 27 (I can't believe he hasn't already published a column lauding his status as an all-state football player in Florida), this dream of playing college football mostly dies.  

Not playing for a top-25 University of Tennessee football team was a dream that died very young for me. DJ and I attended 7-12 grade at Martin Luther King in Nashville (one of two high schools in the entire city at the time that didn't have a football team). Despite being the scion of a all-pro NFL football player, DJ focused on basketball and I focused my sports efforts on being the worst high school soccer player in the state. So college football was an early exit from my list of hoped for accomplishments, but at long last I am in the top 25.   

Of course it is a Top 25 populated by bad writers, malcontents, some taken to writing without capitalization, some writing entirely in capital letters, some utilizing exclamation points in a series despite having said nothing exclamatory, some occasionally threatening one another with physical violence, and at any given time perhaps the largest gathering of people not having had sex in the past month. They are GW basketball fans, and I am one of the their Top 25.   

This is quite a comedown for someone who pictured himself enshrined in everlasting glory scoring touchdown after touchdown in the checkerboard endzone of Neyland Stadium. Instead of playing college football for a top 25 team, I am enshrined in infamous ignomy for posting over 1100 times in the past five years regarding the status of GW basketball. If any reader should doubt this fact go to the link below and check out Kleos. I am currently #18 in the roster of posters.  

http://www.gwhoops.com/discussion.htm  

I have no idea how many words this is (and clearly someone who wrote north of 50k about pudding arcana is nothing if not prolific) but it demonstrates one thing without a doubt: I am officially and indisputably a loser. Which when you get right down to it, almost every fan of sports is. We've all been bested by a dream we can't realize and the same boy who dreamed of glory on football fields, now as a man makes arguments about who GW's basketball team should be starting at the small forward position for an interested audience as large as the crowds for Tonya Harding's boxing matches. And get this, even realizing all these facts, I still care and I still post.  Which I guess is in some ways the ultimate victory; sports dreams fade but passion doesn't.