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, Aug. 27, 2021.

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

There they were: Black cats, skeletons, witches, pumpkins, vampires. You know, all the things I love.

I was staring at a display of newly arrived Halloween merchandise at a country store in North Georgia that my wife and I enjoy visiting, and I was excited to see it. Fall is my favorite season, Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I felt that old familiar excitement humming in my chest. My time of year had arrived at last.

There was only one problem.

This particular store doesn’t have air conditioning, and it was approximately 115 degrees inside. That’s because this moment occurred last weekend in the dog days of mid-August, and as much as I wanted it to be fall and needed it to be fall and felt deep in my heart that it actually was fall, it was not fall and wouldn’t be for several more weeks.

This happens to me every year.

Sometime in the second or third week of August, Starbucks starts advertising pumpkin spice lattes, and retail stores start putting out candy corn and haystacks and Frankenstein rubber masks, and football practice kicks off everywhere, and suddenly every restaurant seems to be offering a dish with apples and cinnamon in it, and about this time I almost have to stop myself from running out into the streets of my subdivision and screaming, “Hey, everybody…IT’S FALL!!!!!”

Except it’s not.

Not yet, anyway.

When will I ever learn? Last Labor Day weekend, I got so jacked up, so ready to overdose on fall vibes that I carried my wife and my in-laws up to the venerable Sky Top Orchard in Hendersonville, N.C., for an afternoon of apple picking, hayrides, scarecrows, hot apple cider doughnuts and general autumn ecstasy.

We arrived to find most of the population of Greenville, S.C., crowding the orchard (and they’d picked most of the trees clean), and it was a crisp 10,000 degrees outside. So much for autumn ecstasy. It’s hard to enjoy a warm apple cider doughnut while the skin is melting off your face.

And I’m reminded of my premature autumn celebrations every time I find myself smiling at a positive report from South Carolina football practice, every time I find myself nodding vigorously during Shane Beamer’s enjoyably upbeat press conferences, every time I catch myself thinking things like, “These guys might surprise some people this year.”

Patience has clearly never been my strength.

But patience is required now, at this moment, with this team and these coaches and this program.

And come what may, I’m forcing myself to hold off on sipping those pumpkin spice lattes for now.

It’s been a strangely fun off-season for Gamecock fans.

I noticed an interesting sensation somewhere back around March. Maybe you did, too.

I was no longer approaching news stories and video clips and updates about the South Carolina football program with dread. I was no longer glancing at the first paragraph of a story about Gamecock football and abruptly flipping my laptop closed and saying aloud, “You know what? I can’t do this right now.” I no longer felt the need to text friends and family members with unannounced missives that said things like, “Have things ever been this bad? It was worse in the late ‘90s, right?”

Instead, Shane Beamer and his new staff seemed to be providing the fan base with something like therapy for our wounded souls, delivering a massive tureen of chicken soup from which our starved spirits could drink. It was like the entire fan base had just collectively taken a yoga class – peace had arrived to the weary. Namaste, y’all.

In gratitude for this respite from turmoil, Gamecock followers seemed eager to get on-board the Peace Train.

I started getting mildly defensive notes from fans even after I’d written columns praising Beamer’s Positivity Plus approach and lauding the new staff’s relaxed, feel-good vibes. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve gotten a letter from a reader over the last few months that included some variation of the sentence “We’ve finally got a coach that actually wants to be here,” well…I’d have several nickels.

I haven’t been immune to all this, either. With every passing Shane Beamer press conference, I find myself reaffirming the gut feeling that he is the guy who is supposed to be in this place at this time.

And this is why, in these last few weeks before the season starts for real and the bullets start flying and our players start getting tackled by someone other than their own teammates, we should all probably remember this.

Like with my premature autumn celebrations, we may be ready for the glory days, and it may feel like the glory days are here, but they may not be here yet.

And that’s OK.

Autumn always arrives. Eventually.

There’s always a day – always – when I feel that it has simply landed on me, when it is suddenly seeping into my pores, and it never happens when I try to will it into being, but only on its own time.

I can remember exactly when it happened last year. It was September 30. I’d woken up before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep, and stumbled down to the basement, flipped on the TV in the darkness and found Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” just starting. For the 450th time, I entered into the movie’s weird, unsettling rhythms.

When it was over, I went outside for a morning walk, wearing shorts and a T-shirt just like I’d been doing every morning since mid-April. Within seconds of being outside, I felt the hair rising on my arms and legs. I glanced at the Weather app on my phone: It was 59 degrees and a little misty. And I still felt that oddly pleasant sensation of being disturbed by the movie.

Yes, this was it. It was fall.

I couldn’t make it come on my own. But it came nonetheless.

Eventually.

And no matter what happens this football season for South Carolina, no matter the record, no matter the final scores, I do believe that the thing we’re all waiting for may finally come.

It won’t come, perhaps, on the schedule we have in mind.

We may be ready now. We may be so very ready now.

But it comes on its own time. Namaste, y’all.

Tell me how you’re feeling as we enter the stretch drive into a new football season by writing me at scottdavis@gamecockcentral.com.

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