Scott Davis has followed Gamecock sports for more than 30 years and provides commentary from a fan perspective.

He writes a weekly newsletter that's emailed each Friday. To sign up for the newsletter, click here. Following is the newsletter for Friday, Dec. 31, 2021.

Scott also writes a weekly column that appears on Gamecock Central during football season.

It happens like magic.

You scrap all year long. You battle. You grind. You keep battling and grinding. You never give up. You win some. You lose some.

Sometimes you shock the world with your poise and maturity. Sometimes you forget to show up.

One week you take down a longtime nemesis. One week you let your archrival run wild all over you…again. It’s one of those years where it truly seems like anything can happen from week to week.

There’s more.

You’re never entirely sure who’ll be starting for you at quarterback. You may field a stingy and occasionally shutdown defense. You may, um, not. On offense? You may score 40 points against Florida. You may set historic lows for offensive ineptitude against Texas A&M. In the words of Kevin Garnett, “Annnnnnnnnnnythinnnnng is possibilllllllllle!!!!!!”

While we’re here, your youthful head coach is in his inaugural season leading a football program. If ever a season should have gotten wild and woolly, this one should have, and did.

But when it’s all over, and you’re looking back on the 2021 South Carolina football season, what lingers in your mind? What’s the taste that is left in your mouth?

The taste in mine is Duke’s mayonnaise.

South Carolina’s strangely dominant, astonishingly efficient and occasionally awe-inspiring 38-21 mastery of North Carolina in Thursday’s Duke’s Mayo Bowl will vibrate in our hearts and souls through these next nine months. It’s what we’ll remember. We’ll come back to it again and again, through the gray monotony of January and February, through the tantalizing spring months and the return of practice, through summer’s overwhelming furnace-blast, on into August and then we do it all over again.

This is what we’ll remember, more than anything, this 38-21 pasting of an ancient rival, this skull-stomping of a team and a program and a state and a fan base that has always seemed to believe itself to be above those of us down here south of the Carolina borderline.

When it gets cold again in three weeks, this is the blanket we’ll warm ourselves with. When we’re sweltering on a beach in July, this is the cool glass of water from which we’ll sip.

One year ago, one December backwards on the calendar, we didn’t know what to make of this program, didn’t know where it was headed, weren’t sure what we had. We liked the new kid leading the team, liked his relentlessly positive vibes. But how could we be sure after the last few years?

Oh, we hoped. We always hope.

Now, just 12 months later, we have something tangible to latch onto, a real live reason to believe.

We have this. We have 38-21, Carolina rolls Carolina in Charlotte.

We have something that feels a lot like the beginning.

Sometimes it seems like bowl games are insignificant.

It feels like they’re exhibition games, glorified scrimmages, silly vestiges of bygone days, relics, antiques and afterthoughts. I have absolutely used the word “meaningless” in more than one column to describe college football bowl games. And there’s still a very large part of me that often wonders exactly why we still play these things.

And yet…

You really do remember that last game of the season, don’t you?

That really is what sticks with you during the endless offseason, what coaches will talk about during the springtime banquet circuit, what fans will point to when they’re chatting amongst themselves about the team’s prospects for the upcoming season.

In a weird way, that last game can make or break the months that follow it, at least in terms of how fans perceive the direction of the program. In practical terms, not much changes regardless of the outcome of a bowl game – you’ve already largely wrapped up recruiting, and you either did or didn’t lose to your archrival, and the seniors and transfers and early draftees that are leaving the program are still leaving the program.

But for fans? It can change almost everything about how we feel. Sometimes the perception becomes reality.

Remember when Will Muschamp’s 2018 edition of the Gamecocks got embarrassed by Virginia in the Belk Bowl to the tune of 28-0? After that loss (in a game in Charlotte, no less), South Carolina finished up the season at 7-6 – the exact same record this year’s team posted. They had a weird, up-and-down campaign, just as this team did.

But they not only lost to an old ACC rival to close the year, they were run out of the stadium in humiliating fashion. That particular offseason then became engulfed in doubt, darkness and waning hopes. It seemed like that Belk Bowl represented the curtain coming down on another era of South Carolina football, which ended up manifesting itself the following year when the Gamecocks went 4-8 and the Muschamp regime entered a death spiral.

And sure, the situation is different here. Shane Beamer’s in Year One. No one expected anything at all from this team in 2021, not after the program collapsed to 2-8 last year and hit the reset button. Just getting to a bowl game meant this off-season would have been brightened by never-ending sunshine.

Right?

Maybe.

But this? This 38-21 shelling of the boys in powder blue?

This helps. This will not be forgotten. Not in January. Not in June. Not for a long time.

Driving home from a celebratory post-game pizza meal with my wife, I suddenly blurted, “You know what? Shane Beamer…this season…I think it actually exceeded my best-case scenario for what this team could do this year.”

I was not at my most articulate.

My belly was filled with sausage pizza. My mind was still swirling from the thundering efficiency South Carolina’s offense had displayed during the game despite the Gamecocks playing a wide receiver at quarterback for much of the contest. Look, if you give this team a bye week or a month off, the offense transforms itself into a punishing, tightly controlled unit that shoves opponents around like department store mannequins. I can’t imagine what they’ll look like in the first game of the 2022 season, after they’ve had nine months off.

How do you explain the outburst in Charlotte? Five hundred and forty-three total yards of offense. Dakereon Joyner and Jaheim Bell and Kevin Harris looking like the best players on the field. A two-point conversion from South Carolina…just because. A defense that didn’t wilt against what was supposed to be one of the ACC’s most potent offenses.

No, I wasn’t feeling eloquent, couldn’t put it all into words.

But I didn’t need to. She knew what I meant. She usually does.

Last December, we didn’t know what Shane Beamer could do as the head coach of a Southeastern Conference football program. No one else did, either.

Now we know.

And after this emphatic, unforgettable day in Charlotte, we’ll remember. Enjoy the New Year, Gamecocks.

For the first time in a long time, you’ve got something to look forward to when it gets here.

Tell me how you felt watching South Carolina dismantle the Tar Heels by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.