34th SEC Championship Game Georgia vs. Alabama

Fellow Poors, I bring tidings of great joy.

Your Georgia Bulldogs have rolled through another regular season with wins over Florida, Auburn, Tennessee, Texas, and the North Avenue Trade School. That’s two straight years of running that gauntlet clean, and it still feels a little unreal.

Never in the long history of this sport has Georgia been this good - for this long. We are living inside the golden age.

And yet… that one team to the west still lingers. The unwelcome visitor to this era of Bulldog bliss. The Cousin Eddie of the Georgia Bulldog Experience: Alabama.

And wouldn’t-you-know-it, that’s their damn gypsy caravan of RV’s headed down I-20, where crossing the state line into Georgia means stepping into both enemy territory and the into future itself, literally by an hour on the clock, and figuratively in every other cultural sense.

What makes this meeting even stranger is that it may not matter at all. The way the new College Football Playoff works, Georgia and Alabama might very well end up playing again in a few weeks. Maybe even in this same building. Maybe even for something that the the white guys in suits will insist is “bigger.” Spare me.

The stakes have never been lower for a game that still makes everyone sick to their stomach.

Win on Saturday and you collect a trophy that used to mean something, then wait a month to play a playoff game for TV.

Lose, and you miss the trophy but get a home playoff game against Virginia or Tulane or some other team that would be around the 6th most interesting game played on UGA’s schedule the season.

None of this feels like the sport we fell in love with. Nobody fell in love with college football because of a bracket reveal. Nobody’s heart was stirred by sorting out the 7-seed versus the 10-seed.

What is it that stamped this silly ritual on our minds and made it a part of our collective cultural identity, so ripe for commercial exploitation? The pain of hearing Rocky Top or Gator Bait after a big play. The joy of walking to your car and sitting in traffic in the dark after winning at Auburn.

And what is it that is eroding that attachment faster with each passing year? Trying to figure out whether your team is better off losing a game to improve its TV-trophy seeding.

But here we are. Pigs at the trough.

Georgia is playing, and all of us, no matter how stupid this system gets, are going to want them to win in a way that is absolutely not healthy.

So let’s lean in.

This week’s PMGN is built around the romantic December Atlanta weekend that only still exists in our collective imagination: Bones, Pano’s & Paul’s, Seeger’s. Johnny’s Hideaway. The Pool Hall. Tailgates staged in the ballrooms of private clubs. The Alliance Theatre at Christmas. The old Egleston Festival of Trees.

The glowing cream-with-black-spider-web-roof of the Georgia Dome on a cold night while red and black floods the streets.

Maybe this game is a glorified exhibition. Maybe it’s a prelude to another chapter of this same matchup. But it’s still Georgia against Alabama in Atlanta…and the chance to ruin an Alabama fan’s night is enough for me.

To the Cause of the Poor. Go Dawgs.