College football is back.

Well, it's not really back -- that can't happen until Notre Dame kicks off next Saturday.

But it's close enough.

After eating dinner and tying up the newspapers for recycling (having missed the last two monthly pickups on the last Wednesday of the month, I'm taking them all the way to Little Silver to either have dad drop them off or to drop them off myself if I remember to get to the place before it closes tomorrow at noon), I continued my preparations for my fantasy football draft by pouring over notes and training camp reports on the bed while keeping the Mets-Braves game on and flipping to Miami-Louisiana Tech and then Maryland-Northern Illinois. Oh, that Maryland. For the second straight year, ranked in the top 25 and losing an opening game it was expected to win.

Casey was in the living room watching those MTV awards.

I don't know if I'm a kinder, gentler college football fan, or if my hatred for Ohio State has really reached an all-time high, but watching Miami manhandle La. Tech didn't turn my stomach the way watching Miami succeed usually does. Maybe I'm just that starved for college football, which could be possible. This is the first season since my first one out of school, 1998, where I've been able to really look forward to it because I know I won't be working on weekends and I'll have a chance to attend one or two games. Last year, though I knew I'd be going to the first two games, I didn't know until a year ago last week that I'd have a new job and would have my Saturdays free. This year, I've had all summer to anticipate the return of ESPN's on-campus College Gameday and Saturday afternoons at Ship of Fools and drunken phone calls to Heather to talk about another amazing Irish touchdown.

I think September has as much of a feeling of a new year as January. The kids from 4 to 24 are back in school, the (summer) holidays are over and we return to our responsibilities -- hopefully -- with a fresh outlook. Somewhere down the line, I could totally see myself holding some teaching position -- ideally in college, teaching some form of journalism -- and getting back to the campus life, walking across leaf-strewn quads in a sweater. If I smoked, I'd have a pipe, because that would be cool.

So this weekend -- a normal, two-day one for me; such is the life of a weekly magazine that closes on Mondays -- I'll make that transition from summer to fall. We're going to the John Mayer/Counting Crows show at the outdoor Arts Center tonight and to Springsteen at Giants Stadium tomorrow. There's a preshow party in the parking lot with a boardwalk scene set up and The Nerds are playing too. And if I find myself sitting idly looking for something on TV, there'll probably be a football game somewhere.

But the real football starts at 2 p.m. next Saturday. Oh, and I've just discovered the coolest thing on my iTunes at work: You can set the time mark on the track to start or end where you want. This means that I can now burn, for example, just "Holiday In Spain" or just "Big Yellow Taxi" from the Counting Crows' Hard Candy instead of burning one 8-minute track with a minute of silence in between the two songs. I should just make a CD of all those kinds of tracks that I only want one part of. That's so fucking cool.