Game Day coming up. Yes, Duke football will open its 2021 football season Friday night in Charlotte.
It’s a new season and hope springs eternal, as the saying goes. But “new season” can mean a lot of things in this crazy, old world.
Certainly, any team coming off a 2-9 season is ready to turn the page and move on. And opening at Charlotte is a much easier ask than opening at Notre Dame, as Duke did last season, or a neutral-site game against Alabama, as Duke did in 2019.
But it’s also the presumed return of something resembling normalcy for a Duke football team that spent the 2020 season staring at a computer screen instead of interacting with fellow students and professors, a season without home fans, a season that tested the mental toughness of every single person associated with the program.