T.S. Eliot may have thought that April was the cruelest month, but for the Average Joe, that distinction belongs to August.  It's the last, hottest month before college football starts, and the anticipation just kills me.  It's like too much foreplay - sooner or later, it's just time to get it on.

It's like this every year.  Spring and summer are enough time to let those of us who wish just how bad last year was.  And even if last year was great for you, the long summer is enough to wear off the afterglow and make you hungry for more.  Last year, the end of the college season came mercifully, like euthanasia.  As far as I'm concerned, 2004 had to die, and I'm glad it finally did.  But that's all in the past now, and I'm fired up and ready to go for the 2005 season.

I've even got a routine I get into as summer draws to a close.  It's like training for a marathon, but different.  Instead of long afternoons running, my regimen consists mostly of obsessive reading of Internet message boards, a healthy amount of watching game tapes from last year, and most importantly, getting my bourbon legs back under me.

What's that, you say?  Bourbon legs?  Yep, you read it right.  Bourbon legs.  It's like sea legs.  If you just walk onto a boat and head out to sea for an extended period of time, you're going to have some rough going until you get your sea legs under you.  It's a breaking-in process.  Where sailors have their sea legs, I have my bourbon legs.  

You don't think I'd just waltz up to a long college football season without rebuilding my bourbon tolerance, do you?  Hell no, I wouldn't.  Not any more than I'd try to roll my fat ass out of bed tomorrow and run a marathon.  These things take training.  By December, as the college season winds down, I'm a machine.  You can just open my mouth and pour bourbon in Bluto-style, and it won't faze me.  But that's at the end of the year.  And by that time, I need a break.  I'll switch to mostly beer, and when spring comes around, gin and tonic just seems like the right thing to do.  Before long, I'll be out of bourbon shape again.

So when spring turns to summer, I know it's time to start getting ready again.  I start slowly in June and progress until late August, when I can respectably hold my own.  Invariably, there will be speed bumps.  The college baseball Super Regional provided one, when the merciless Texas Longhorns outclassed my Rebels, beating Ole Miss back-to-back in Oxford after the Rebels had marched to within one win of the College World Series.  Far too much really-fine Booker's bourbon was sacrificed on that altar, and my total loss of acceptable decorum led to severe rebuke from the Average Jane.

But that's another story.  My bourbon legs are just about firmly back under me now after a pretty solid June and July of work.  How many fifths of Jim Beam gave themselves up in this quest?  You got me.  But the end is in sight.  August, while long and hot, will eventually give way to September, and then the season will begin and it will all be well worth it.

I've taken this training to a new level this year, introducing multitasking.  No, I'm not just sitting around drinking anymore.  I'm sitting around drinking and watching football at the same time!  This way, I get the double whammy, bourbon training and game tape watching at once.  It's my version of film study.  And I take it seriously, too.  I don't just watch all the fun wins.  I make it a point to revisit the deflating losses too, and the brutal punishings.  As much as I'd love to believe that everything is going to be just fine this year, I need to go back and remember just how awful last year was in order to fully appreciate any good fortune that may come my way this season.

I've found that the synergy of film study and drinking has added benefits.  I've already had plenty of opportunity to get my look of disgust into midseason form.  I quickly remembered what aspects of play will likely frustrate me most again this year.  And the re-experiencing of past failures has accelerated my drinking schedule, just as the original failures did.  Watching the tapes while drinking is like adding mountains to your bike workouts - it makes you work that much harder.

I highly recommend that you develop your own season preparation rituals.  It makes August more interesting, at the very least.  It gives you another good reason to think about football.  And when the real games start, you'll be ready to rock.  No first-game tailgating faux pas for you.  No embarrassing realization that you can't hold your liquor past the third quarter.  And you will avoid that most unmanly of stadium transgressions - having to ask somebody else who No. 47 is.  Believe me, if you are a serious fan, this is not something you want to have to resort to.  

So get on the Internet and print out the roster.  Pour yourself a Beam and Coke with at least a 50/50 ratio.  Get yourself on the couch in front of the TV and pop in that tape of a big win last year.  You'll thank me, and when college football finally gets here, you'll be ready.