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Football Fix Should Help The Hokies

August 4, 2007

By Bob Lipper

Virginia Tech launched preseason football practice this week, which is a good thing for a bunch of players whose spring was yanked from under their cleats and a soothing thing for a campus and extended family still internalizing the hangover of tragedy.

April 16 still lingers in Blacksburg. It'll always be there.

Kent State.

Oklahoma City.

Katrina.

Sept. 11.

The shootings at Virginia Tech.

These things won't ever go away.

So it'd be unreasonable and insensitive to expect a football team and a football season to erase the memory of 32 innocent people dying at a place where there are no walls or barbed wire or foxholes or checkpoints.

Just fields and walkways where students mess around and stroll. And buildings where ideas and freedom of expression are prized. And laboratories where research is carried on.

And a stadium where 65,000 members of Hokie Nation will gather Sept. 1 for a group hug and to remember.

And maybe let loose a little bit (which will be OK — really).

Football matters at Virginia Tech. Football matters at tons of colleges (sometimes it matters too much), but it really resonates in certain locales. Tech is in that second category. Maybe it's because it's a little isolated and needs a rallying point. Maybe it's because it doesn't have the law school or the med school to brag on. Maybe it's because it didn't grow up in the ACC's basketball culture.

Whatever the case, football counts for a lot at Tech.

Right now, it's never counted for more.

It can't bind the wound.

It can't muffle the pain.

But it can provide a lift and bonding agent.

And some assurance that life goes on.

"We know that our football team is a big part of the healing process for the community of Blacksburg," offensive tackle Duane Brown said recently at the ACC's Football Kickoff. "Everyone in Blacksburg is using football as a way to get back into the groove and get things back the way they used to be. It's a lot of pressure, but it's not unwanted pressure."

The run-up to the opener began Thursday when 104 players convened on a field unoccupied the past 3½ months. Beamer wisely called off workouts April 17 and scrapped the spring game — the notion of beer-foam tailgating obviously being at odds with the devastation and sorrow experienced just five days before.

Since then, Beamer has been the school's ambassador to the grief-stricken — his football-coach visibility translating into face-of-the-university comfort for those who've suffered such unimaginable losses. By all accounts, he's handled the role well — doing and saying all the right things, telling anyone who'll listen that "we'll be a closer group than ever."

He was talking Virginia Tech there, not football.

His team, by extension, is about to join him in the effort, and there's responsibility in the assignment. That doesn't mean the Hokies need to go 12-0 and take aim on a national championship (although they might have a shot). It doesn't mean they'll let everyone down if they lose at, say, Baton Rouge or Atlanta.

It means they'll have to play hard and stay in line and give their followers something to be proud of and gather around. And, if needed, something to cling to.

Because, at Tech, football can be that.

"In a university setting, there are so many different interests," Beamer said. "There are some people who are interested in music. There are some people who are interested in calculators, whatever. But on Saturdays, that's the common interest."

And never before as much as now.

Contact staff writer Bob Lipper at blipper@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6555.