waking up to get back to their normal lives, a team of doctors will roll me into an operating room in Cleveland for the six-hour surgery that will save my life. As the anesthesia kicks in and my t

AUSTIN, Texas -- After Texas, the team that found new and interesting ways to lose last season, coughed up a 17-point, third-quarter lead at home against No. 10 Notre Dame;After the Longhorns scored a touchdown to regain the lead with 3 minutes, 29 seconds to play, only to see the Fighting Irish block the extra point attempt and return it for the deuce that sent the game into overtime, 37-37;After senior quarterback Tyrone Swoopes, who decided to tutor his freshman replacement, Shane Buechele, instead of freeze him out, scored the winning touchdown in the second overtime;After head coach Charlie Strong stopped on his jog into the locker room to hug Gov. Greg Abbott, the honorary captain;After Texas opened the 2016 season with a 50-47, double-overtime win, it sure feels different in Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. The record crowd of 102,315 that went deliriously into the steamy holiday night might wake up on Labor Day and remember that the Longhorns are only 1-0. But if ever a program will get a bounce from one victory, Texas will use this one as a springboard.Weve been down for so long and people have been talking about us, Strong said. It was a night for us to just make it right. At least for one game, for one game. Im just so proud of our football team.A year ago, Texas lost 38-3 at Notre Dame, and lost at Cal on a missed extra point attempt in the final two minutes, and lost to Oklahoma State because of a fumbled punt snap in the final minute. The Longhorns beat Oklahoma and got shut out by Iowa State. They were a 5-7 mess, another chapter of a program that has been in turmoil ever since quarterback Colt McCoys arm went numb in the BCS National Championship Game seven seasons, one coach, two athletic directors and 35 losses ago.Time has passed. Enough time has passed that the university felt it could honor the 2005 national championship team without it reflecting on the current run of mediocrity. At halftime, 89 members of that team took the field to cheers, none as loud as when its coach stepped forward to speak. ESPN analyst Mack Brown, wearing a going-to-the-bank blue suit, was bathed in love only three years after the Orangebloods shed few tears when he left.Time has passed because the Longhorns started rookies in the programs two most celebrated positions. The crowd also roared when Bevo XV stepped onto the FieldTurf for the first time. But the 1,100-pound, 19-month-old grand champion show steer didnt perform as well as Buechele, who threw for 280 yards and two touchdowns in his first college game.The January enrollee has star written all over him. The writing is always in erasable ink until a freshman actually plays for a while. For every Josh Rosen, the UCLA quarterback who threw for 351 yards and three touchdowns in his collegiate debut a year ago, there is a Josh Rosen, who threw for 106 yards and three interceptions two weeks later.Judging by the plays Buechele ran, he had a thin playbook. His 28 passes, of which he completed 16, consisted largely of throws into the flat and just across the line. Six throws, however, showed off his ability to throw the deep fade with precision and strength.Buechele completed three of them, two for touchdowns and a third that set up another. A 19-yard first-quarter throw to?Armanti Foreman?on the left edge of the end zone was a textbook throw and an even better catch. A 68-yarder to Jerrod Heard, who started 10 games at quarterback last year and is now a wide receiver, set up the Horns third touchdown.The longest, a 75-yarder to John Burt on the second play of the second half, gave Burt the chance to redeem himself for the sure touchdown he dropped when Buechele hit him in full stride on the Longhorns second possession of the game.Being able to come in [in January] and have these guys trust me was a big thing, Buechele said. Being able to come in and have those guys take me in, I was really thankful for that. Just being able to have their trust is all I ask for.No one believed in Buechele more than Swoopes, the 6-foot-4, 249-pound, run-first quarterback. He deleted Twitter and Instagram off his phone last week because he didnt want to hear the public wail about his limitations.Against Notre Dame, Swoopes illustrated why his package of plays is known as the 18-Wheeler. He directed most of the two second-quarter touchdowns that gave Texas a 21-14 lead. When he returned to the game in both overtimes, the worn-down Notre Dame defense could not slow him down. Irish safety Avery Sebastian took him on in the second overtime and had to be helped off the field. Swoopes scored the winning touchdown on a 6-yard run on the next play.It feels different, but it feels good, said Swoopes, who finished with 53 yards on 13 carries. Anything that I have to do to win, Ill do it. I feel like this team has the same mentality. ... I dont know what it was. I dont know how to describe it. I just knew we were going to keep on fighting.The Longhorns gained 517 yards of total offense ?in their first game under new coordinator Sterlin Gilbert, another sign that maybe Year 3 will be different for Strong. He has taken a lot of guff for going 11-14 since he has been in Austin.On Sunday night, the calendar read September. But Strongs team had just won a game that felt like November. At the end of his conference, someone asked him if he felt a sense of relief.No, Strong said, laughing, because Ive still got a few more to go, so I dont have any relief. I dont think you get any relief.This time, the heartbreak was felt on the other sideline. The Longhorns face Oklahoma and Oklahoma State in the first half of the season. They will find out soon enough if this victory signified a change, or merely a finish in which the coin flipped their way. The thing about coin flips is, if you flip one 12 times, you usually finish around 6-6. Cory Spangenberg Jersey . The parade and rally were held to celebrate the Saskatchewan Roughriders 45-23 win over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats on Sunday in the CFLs championship game. Youth Padres Jerseys .ca NFL Power Rankings, overtaking the Denver Broncos and remaining ahead of NFC competition San Francisco, Carolina and New Orleans. http://www.cheappadresjerseyschina.com/ . Bryant, who signed a five-year, $34 million contract as a free agent with Cleveland in March, reported symptoms on Monday morning, a team spokesman said. Padres Jerseys Outlet . Gerald Green and Miles Plumlee? Green had bounced around the NBA when he wasnt playing overseas. The Pacers gave up on Plumlee after just one season. Now Green and Plumlee are key cogs in the Suns surprising breakout season. Randy Jones Jersey . MORITZ, Switzerland -- Fog prevented downhill racers from getting their Olympic dress rehearsal. When I was 8 years old in the fall of 1984, my father purchased a bottle of cheap champagne that said Chicago Cubs 1984 NL East Champions. He promised we would pop open the bottle and spray it all over each other when the Cubs won the World Series. But then a ball rolled through Leon Durhams legs. Steve Garvey pumped his fist. And the bottle never got opened.When my parents moved, the bottle went with them. Another shelf. Another layer of dust.It went through Will Clark in 89. The high of Game 163 in 1998, and the low of being swept by the Braves days later. And then 2003. I wont name names. But I watched in utter jealousy as the Red Sox and White Sox ended their tortuous droughts in subsequent years. Someday, I told myself. Someday.A few years back, my oldest daughter asked me why we cheer for a team that always loses -- that hadnt won a World Series since a date that she couldnt even process. I talked to her about loyalty. About belief. And about how amazing it would be when that someday finally happened. I told her the story of the time Theo Epstein walked me through the Cubs training facility in Arizona, pointed at the 1908 and 1945 World Series banners hanging from above and told me to ignore them. Were going to get a couple of those for ourselves, he insisted that day.Epstein knew -- this was about far more than being the best baseball team in the world. This was about family. About generation after generation passing along a love for something while not knowing when the payoff would ever come.This year I believed was the year. But a sobering thing happened before these playoffs even began. I was at the gym when I took the call. The words on the other end were numbing. Open heart surgery. Sooner rather than later. A little less than a year earlier, doctors had discovered an aneurysm on my aorta, the same ailment that killed actor John Ritter. They told me I probably would need surgery at some point in my life. But a cardiac surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, the same one who saved the life of NBA forward Jeff Green, had reviewed my case. He didnt think I should wait. He told me I had a month. Maybe two.Before his nurse could even explain the procedure, before the talk of stopping my heart or putting me on a ventilator, I said four words: After the World Series. She said something about the Indians, how she wasnt sure they would even make the World Series. And I told her no. She didnt get it. This was because of the Cubs. I pulled out a calendar and told her we could schedule the procedure for the first Monday after the World Series: Nov. 7. The doctors agreed.And so did most everyone who knows me well. They got it. Yes, technically, I was walking around with a ticking time bomb in my chest. The aneurysm could rupture at any point -- a potentially fatal occurrence. But the odds were small. One friend texted me, Forget the World Series. Forget the Cubs. This is the World Series of life.I told him I couldnt do it. I had to wait.And so for the past month Ive watched every pitch of every game with an even greater sense of interest. I had been scheduled to cover the Cubs through the postseason for ESPN, but after one day at Wrigley Field before the start of the National League Division Series, I knew I couldnt handle it.A little more than 30 years ago, on the afternoon of May 26, 1986, my grandfather had a stroke at Wrigley Field. His friends said he was heckling Pete Rose when it happened. He spent the rest of his life in a nursing home, unable to use the left side of his body. I had been to Wrigley probably a hundred times since then. Each time I climbed those cement stairs and looked out to the ivy and old scoreboard, I thought about him and how much he loved the Cubs. But on the day before this years division series, a paralyzing fear came over me. What if I was next? I began to sweat. And shake. I tried to talk to colleagues and friends like everything was fine. But inside I was flipping out. I left without writing a word.On the drive home, I decided I would spend this October surrounded by family and friends. If the unthinkable was going to happen, I wanted to have the people I loved by my side. Each victory against the Giants and Dodgers brought the Cubs one step closer to the World Series, and at the same time, brought me one day closer to surgery.When the ffinal opponent ended up being the Cleveland Indians, I had no words.dddddddddddd My father had grown up in Cleveland a die-hard Indians fan. He moved to Chicago in his 20s, decided there was no way he could cheer for the rival White Sox and picked the Cubs as his new team. He fell in love with Wrigley and introduced it all to me. I never had a chance.Now, here was his hometown, the same place I would soon visit to help save my life, facing the Cubs in the World Series. In the last week of October, I went to Cleveland for a series of pre-op tests. It just so happened the dates were the same as Games 1 and 2 of the World Series. On the day of Game 1, I bounced from appointment to appointment in a Cubs T-shirt. Most everyone gave me a hard time -- playfully. I threw it right back. When one nurse chucked a wad of paper at me and I dropped it, I quickly replied, My bad. I catch about as well as the Indians. We all laughed. After my final test that day, my wife and I headed straight to Progressive Field for Game 1. It was surreal. The Cubs. The Indians. My team. My dads team. The World Series. And in the left-field corner, a massive ad for the Cleveland Clinic.For most of the postseason, I had managed to stay relatively calm during games. I watched my wife roll herself into a ball on the couch. There were friends who refused to move an inch when something good happened. And others who admitted to wearing the same underwear after a Cubs win. But I stayed relatively sane, taking a rational approach to the highs and lows of the postseason. Until Game 7, that is. I spent all of Wednesday unsure what to do with myself. I cleaned the house. I took out the garbage. Then my wife reminded me it wasnt garbage day.For my entire life I had wondered what this moment would be like. The Cubs, one win away from the World Series. Where would I watch the final game? In the stadium? The press box? A bar? The streets of Wrigleyville? But now that the biggest Cubs game of my life was here, I was home. On the couch.Throughout the night, I listened to my 2-year-old repeat the chorus to Go Cubs Go over and over and over again. I chuckled when she pointed to the TV and yelled KRIS BRYANT! and then danced maniacally to one of?Anthony Rizzos walk-up songs, Intoxicated. But perhaps I was most touched by a moment in the eighth inning, when Rajai Davis hit his tying home run and my older daughter turned to me, probably reading the pain, fear and anguish on my face and said, Dad, its going to be OK. We got this.From then on, its all a bit of a blur. When Ben Zobrist doubled home Albert Almora Jr. to give the Cubs the lead in the 10th, I know I high-fived my neighbor so hard he thought I broke his hand. And when the final ground ball rolled into Bryants glove and he threw it to Rizzo, I know I grabbed my daughter, held her as tightly as I could and whispered in her ear, This is why we believe.From there, I thought about my father. My mother. My grandparents. I thought about Richard Savage, Betty Maute, Helen Keiling and so many other older Cubs fans I had met over the years who were no longer with us. There was champagne. No, it wasnt that same bottle from 1984. At some point, in some move after Dad died, that bottle disappeared. But the moment was just as special. I dont remember what time I went to bed. But when I woke up Thursday morning, the TV in my bedroom was still on. My daughter was sleeping next to me, and the first thing my eyes saw was a replay of Epstein being doused with champagne. It wasnt a dream.Early Monday morning, around the time the people in Chicago begin waking up to get back to their normal lives, a team of doctors will roll me into an operating room in Cleveland for the six-hour surgery that will save my life. As the anesthesia kicks in and my thoughts begin to drift to a calming place, Ill see a bunch of grown men in blue jerseys jumping up and down in an infield. Ill see a 39-year-old backup catcher ending his career in the most unimaginable way possible.Ill picture that bottle of champagne, cork popped, sitting empty on my kitchen counter. Deep inside there will be smiles. For the Chicago Cubs just won the World Series.And I was alive to see it. Camo China NFL Jerseys Disocunt Football Jerseys Cheap NFL Gear Wholesale Jerseys 2020 Cheap Nike NFL Jerseys Cheap Authentic Jerseys Cheap NFL Jerseys ' ' '