By: Jeff Doke

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

For almost every year of my five decades on this planet, the end of October has been a time of the year I have enthusiastically anticipated.

As a young boy, it was the sirens call of Halloween, with the annual trip to Gibson’s to select the perfect Ben Cooper costume and the anticipation of how many houses in Northwood Estates would have full-size candy bars this year (we could always count on a couple).

As I grew older, the building anticipation came from when we would be making our annual trip to the Jaycees haunted house.

I think my dad and I had more fun laughing at the other people scared out of their wits than we were ever actually scared by the experience.

At least once he tried to chase down a group that literally ran screaming from the exit just so he could offer to pay to let them go through again. Fifty-two years and I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder.

After that,  it became a matter of wondering if I was going to get invite to the good Halloween parties in high school. Think post-pubescent Charlie Brown obsessively checking his locker to see if any notes had been slipped in between classes. Spoiler alert: they rarely were.

The one constant through all of those eras – as well as every era since – has been the heady anticipation of the one UGA football rivalry that hasn’t been shuffled and re-dealt by the SEC home offices.

The one game that we could pretty much always count on being on TV, even in the four channel days when our Dawg fix would usually come from WGIG via the global band AM radio in my dad’s workshop.

From the Dooley days to Goff, on through Donnan and Richt, and finally the arrival of King Kirby, the end of October meant one thing and one thing only to the mean machine in Red & Black – the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. The Border War. The Georgia Florida game.

During the lean years, Ga/Fla was our SEC Championship before there was such a thing. It was the Super Bowl, Worl Series, and Daytona 500 all rolled into one. It was the pinnacle of the football year. We could go 0-11 the rest of the year as long as we beat Florida…okay 1-10. Still gotta thump Tech. Priorities, man.

It’s a well-established fact that the Spurrier years were rough for the rivalry. Ole’ Satan in a Sun visor had our number just about every single year, and hope was hard to come by.

I was briefly involved with a Florida fan once, and she said that in those days, Florida fans didn’t care about the game because they knew they were going to win, they were just glad to be able to drink at the tailgate.

Ouch. Not inaccurate, but ouch, nonetheless.

Those days are thankfully a thing of the past, and the tables have turned just about as much as any table could.

Dawg fans are living through the golden years and should appreciate them as such.

Gator nation on the other hand is suffering through one off the worst SEC coaching administrations for someone not named “Dave Shula.”

Billy “Swing blade” Napier is bad. Really bad. Historically so in the annuls of Gainesville programs. Recruiting, coaching, PR, the Gators are stinking up the joint on all points, have been since the end of the Mullen run, and there is no real sense of hope that it will get any better anytime soon.

Considering all of this, has the WLOCP lost some of it’s luster? Does a massively lopsided matchup make this game anything less than “Must See TV?”

What, are you kidding me? Did you not hear me mention Spurrier a few paragraphs back? Remember those years. Remember the mocking, the sneering, the drunken gator chomps you endured walking back to the parking garage from the Gator Bowl/AllTel/EverBank.

Revel in the fact that we’re the ones barking now while the jorts-clad masses are weeping into their Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

And Go Dawgs!