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Labor Day has passed, and while others celebrated the death of summer and the re-emergence of fall, I set out to chronicle the finale of the least-discussed and most exciting sporting event of the summer: Road Rules/Real World Fresh Meat Challenge.

A couple of months ago, I endorsed Wes from Real World: Austin as summer's most intriguing sports hero. The following weeks have only further solidified my opinion. If you haven't been watching, you truly are wasting your life. And now, Wes and his teammate Casey have advanced to face Kenny and Tina and Darrell and Aviv in an epic final with the winning team receiving $250,000 in cash. Yep, the Game Diary is back.

1. Wes uses the word "catalyst" to describe how he and Casey are going to be able to take advantage of their performance thus far in elimination events. Percentage of MTV viewers in Alabama who believe Wes was talking about cows: 75.

2. Before I get angry e-mail from ACC fans, I also watched FSU vs. Miami. Word is FSU coach Bobby Bowden didn't want to play this game on Monday because he is also a big fan of Fresh Meat.

3. Has there been an MTV reality show in the past 10 years that doesn't make use of clouds moving at rapid speed across the sky? I don't think so. Here the clouds are accompanied by a sunset and sunrise. I have chills.

4. Tina says, "There's a huge difference between $250,000 and $30,000 dollars." This is the kind of pregame analysis I need more of. Maybe Tina can take Mark May's job. Immediately thereafter, Darrell drinks from a jug of water that is about the size of his torso while wearing a towel draped over his head. I have no idea how this could come about, but I'm intimidated.

5. A life-flight helicopter just passed over my condo, so I couldn't hear what Casey said. I'm sure it went something like this, "So, gosh, tee-hee, my toe, fun."

6. So the final Exile is on the beach and host T.J. Lavin is, for some reason, wearing his first collared shirt of the summer. Lavin informs everyone that the final race will be 10 miles long and will feature two puzzles that can either make the race easier or harder for the teams. Solve the first puzzle and you don't have to carry any weight. Fail to solve the puzzle and you have to carry up to 100 pounds of sand. Also, the teams are tethered together by a 6-foot line. This means if Wes decides to drown Casey in the ocean, she can't run away from him.

8. Wes strikes: "She's (Casey's) too young, immature and stupid to understand how much is really on the line right now." Classic. I only wish that for the next Challenge, Wes could be teamed with Kyndra from the new Laguna Beach. Please, someone make this happen for the benefit of reality fans everywhere.

9. Darrell and Aviv are the only team to solve the puzzle, so they only have to carry 50 pounds of sand while everyone else has to carry 100 pounds. This is a ridiculous sentence to have just written. I think someone at Vanderbilt Law School is looking into whether they can rescind my law degree.

10. Tension flares with Kenny and Tina: "I wish your muscles were as big as your f'in mouth," Kenny says. Tina refrains from ending their debate by pointing out that Kenny has on tights.

11. Darrell and Aviv are running. They've left everyone behind. There is zero suspense left in the contest.

12. Wes says, "There is absolutely no secret why it is we made it to the final challenge. I worked as hard as I could in the Exiles. It came down to the fact that I really wanted to be here regardless of how pathetic Casey is at the game." Then, we get a nice MTV slow-motion montage of Wes and Casey's summer together. I'm sorry, the tears are coming even though I don't want them to.

13. Darrell and Aviv solve the second puzzle and this thing has turned into a Little League blowout. These two finish while it is still daylight and pocket $250,000.

14. The other two teams finish in the darkness. Tina and Kenny take second while Wes and Casey take third. At least MTV got a nice shot of Wes and Casey finishing with the stars outlined above them. Touching.

15. Take it away, Wes: "We're third place, which is really not that impressive and anyone who says congratulations for bronze can suck my ..." This would be a classic Olympics acceptance speech.

16. Darrell accepts victory with understated class, "Y'all got to get rid of me while you can. If I'm there and you ain't on my team, you ain't f------ winning. ... History repeats itself." Understated perfection. Darrell is definitely acting like he's been there before.

17. Everyone exchanges hugs and some people cry. The entire show has been very anti-climatic. Thanks to Wes for keeping the summer entertaining. Now I'm on to more serious television, like waiting for The Office to begin anew.

A reader forwarded this advertisement to me. Not that I think the Miami Dolphins are stretching for ticket sales, but their game against the Tennessee Titans on Sunday, Sept. 24, is being marketed as the "Hispanic Heritage Game."

Good idea, because when I think of Hispanic Heritage, I definitely think of the Tennessee Titans. The Dolphins might as well acknowledge to their fans that this is the, "No one wants to see the Titans play" game. As a Titans fan, it's sad, but true.

A couple of things I loved about the Louisville-Kentucky game last Sunday: First, the Kentucky coaches wore matching shirts that looked like they were crafted from space-age fibers. Every time the camera caught head coach Rich Brooks, I halfway expected for him to be on the sideline wrapping the Mars Rover inside his shirt.

Second, the single best image of a fan from this weekend had to go to the Kentucky fan who was standing alongside a Louisville fan. The Louisville fan was holding up a sign that said something like, "We're going to kill Kentucky," and the Kentucky fan was just grinning and nodding. This is the football equivalent of telling a joke to the firing squad moments before they pull the trigger.

I alluded to it earlier, but has there been a more evil pair of girls on television than Kyndra and Cami on the new Laguna Beach? At some point, I'm expecting for them to take a baby out of a carriage and suck the blood out of the child while they make fun of the mom for being fat. These girls make Janice from The Sopranos seem like Katie Couric. Of course, I haven't missed an episode.

Has anyone else made the huge error of telling a woman about the new timing rules in college football? I made the mistake of telling my wife, and she was obsessed with the new timing rules from then on. Probably because I said the rules were designed to shorten the game, and anything that shortens the amount of time I watch college football she is for.

Every five seconds, she would tap me and say, "Why isn't the clock running?" Take some advice from me, do not tell your wife or girlfriend that the rules have changed for timing games. My wife just looked over my shoulder while I was typing this and said, "Well, I like to see things run efficiently and this time thing is not being run efficiently. It's absurd."

She's absolutely right. The new timing rules are ridiculous. (Incidentally, if you are a woman who is a huge college football fan and is married to a man who isn't, don't tell him either.)

Actual e-mail from a Florida fan, describing Urban Meyer's genius offense: "I don't like Urban's offense because every player on every play has to misdirect, spin in place twice, dress themselves in drag and lip synch Gloria Gaynor before running a route or making a block. That would be an effective offense if you were playing a team of gay 10-year-olds with ADHD, but Tennessee only meets two of those descriptors."

Truly, it's a sad beginning to fall. The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, has died. Honestly, there has never been an episode of Irwin's program that didn't immediately draw me into it. I could be watching the threesome scene from Wild Things, but if somehow the station got changed and The Crocodile Hunter was on, I wouldn't change it back. Everyone else I know felt the same way.

When my brother-in-law came back from Australia two years ago, the first thing he said about his trip down under was this, "Dude, I got to meet the Crocodile Hunter." For the first 20 minutes of his discussion about Australia, this was all he wanted to talk about. And this made perfect sense to me.

I suppose there's an irony in Irwin being killed by one of the least-threatening animals he ever approached. The same man who literally kissed the most dangerous snake in the world, felled by the tiny stingray. According to what I've read, Irwin is only the 17th person in the history of the world to be killed by a stingray. Even still, for a man who made a living bridging the divide between man and nature, there is symmetry to the wilds of nature ending his life. He died immersed in what he loved and that's more than can be said for most of us. He'll be missed.

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