Same as it ever was

What more can be said about another vomitous performance by the Golden Gopher football team? The Brewster Era kicked off with a showing that was positively Masonesque. Or Wackeresque. Or Guteyesque. In other words, completely representative of every slight that Gopher fans have endured over the past two decades.

I know what the spinmeisters (a.k.a. Sid, Mona, Maxie and the rest of the WCCO crew) are going to say -- they came out flat, fell behind 21-0, but after that they dominated the game and it's just a darn shame they dug themselves too big a hole to get out of. Heck, even the Strib story online tonight reflected that tone with a headline that read "Gophers' rally falls one point short."

Except that their rally didn't fall short. They took a 24-21 lead and couldn't hold it. Then, they took a 31-24 lead in OT and couldn't stop Bowling Green from scoring, or from completing their own rally with a 2-point conversion.

That's because when it came time to put the game away, the Gophers couldn't get it done. When the offense could have made it tougher on Bowling Green by scoring a touchdown on their last drive, they ended up with a field goal. Not that it would have mattered, probably, because every Gopher fan knows the Falcons would have scored a TD on their last drive had they needed it. They were going up against the Gophers' defense, after all, the defense that has patented the dropped interception, the fourth-down conversion, the close-but-not-quite-good-enough two-minute drill.

And we're left to read quotes like the following: "We needed to close it out. We needed to make one play on defense."

That was Brewster talking after the game, but it might as well have been Mason, or Wacker, or Gutekunst. But mostly Mason. I mean, if you didn't have fourth-quarter flashbacks to Texas Tech last year, Wisconsin the year before, Michigan in '03, Purdue in '01, Northwestern in '00 ... hell, pick a Big Ten team and I could probably find a year when the Gophers collapsed in the fourth quarter against them.

So, the Brewster Era has begun. Let's just hope we're not soon quoting another classic rock song: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Don't get fooled again, indeed.