And if you close your eyes / Does it almost feel like nothing’s changed at all?
— “Pompeii,” Bastille
I’m not sure I ever actually wrote about it here, but I listened to “Pompeii” a lot back in 2014, when I was covering a Florida football season that had all of the requisite enthusiasm — the vim and vigor and vitality you want from a college football crowd — in the stands in The Swamp, and little to none of the magic on the field to match it.
Literally, if you closed your eyes, it could almost feel like nothing had changed from any of many glory days in Gainesville since Steve Spurrier’s return to Alachua County as an acclaimed coach and not just the forever favorite son of a program he helped build once and then built again.