University of Memphis Football Tigers

Do you know about Nextdoor.com? It’s a social media site that links you with your neighbors, providing an online forum for discussing common concerns: garage sales, lost and found pets, garbage and recycling, criminal activity, references for chimney sweeps and handymen, and curb alerts, where someone announces they’re putting, say, an old couch on the curb. First come, first served.

Last Sunday, the greatest curb alert of all time was posted on the Central Gardens Nextdoor.com site. It read:

Curb Alert – Ole Miss Football Season

The Ole Miss football season is on the curb by the Liberty Bowl.

Frankly, it was a rare example of wit on the site. Most posts are pretty mundane and some are borderline paranoid. “Suspicious” is perhaps the most-used word on Nextdoor.com. As in, “suspicious-looking teens walking down alley behind my house on Vinton at 4:45 p.m. Be aware.” I leave it to you to guess what usually constitutes a suspicious-looking teen. But, occasional paranoia aside, the site is pretty useful.

As is a big win over that SEC team from Oxford.

I was out Friday night, listening to the City Champs at the Buccaneer. During a break, I got into a conversation with a couple of Ole Miss fans from Nashville. I could tell they were Ole Miss fans because they were dressed entirely in red and white, and they were a little drunk and a little loud. But they were raving about Memphis. Seriously.

“There’s no music like this in Nashville,” they said. “There are no little clubs like this. It’s all that country shit.” They’d just had a large time earlier in the evening in Cooper-Young, and then in Overton Square, where someone had told them that they’d hear the best music in town at the Buc.

Then talk turned, as it must when talking to people dressed in garish school colors, to football. The Rebel fans conceded that Memphis had a nice offense and that Paxton Lynch was a “good college quarterback.” But, they explained, helpfully, Memphis was not ready for SEC competition. “Y’all’s defense won’t know what hit them,” they said. “SEC football is on a different level. It might be a game for a quarter or so,” they said, “but our depth will wear y’all down.”

I blush to admit now that I sort of agreed with them. Like most Memphians, I was hoping the Tigers could score enough to make the game interesting, but I had few illusions that Memphis could actually beat Ole Miss.

I’ve never been happier to be wrong about something in my life. And I’m happy the Ole Miss fans at least had a great night in Memphis before their team got kicked to the curb.

They were right about one thing: It was a game for a quarter or so.

Here we are on the seam of two athletic seasons, and we’re getting a little giddy. There’s the collegiate football season still underway for the University of Memphis, but already, with the Tigers not just bowl-eligible but undefeated and, after the near-blowout victory over Ole Miss, ranked, the commentators are saying, quite seriously, the Tigers could play in a New Year’s Day bowl. For the uninitiated, that’s when the Big Boys from the Big Conferences play their bowl games.

Now, if we can just manage to stay off the cover of Sports Illustrated — as dependable a hex as any uncovered thus far by paranormal investigators. And beyond that, if we can manage to hold on to Justin Fuente for a season or two more.

And basketball season is right around the corner. We’ve learned, happily, during the course of the last several seasons, that we no longer need be dependent on the basketball Tigers’ pulling rabbits (and NCAA bids) out of the hat, because, hey, we’ve also got the Grizzlies, dependable title challengers in the NBA’s tough Western Conference, year after year. They’ve been on the cover of SI already — and ridden out the dependable curse the Fates always bestow on the headiness that comes with that honor. Now maybe the Grizz are immunized from any further blowback, such as the playoff loss that followed the last such cover, in 2013.

As always, a little rain must fall, however. The fact that success on the part of Josh Pastner and the basketball Tigers isn’t quite as imperative for our mental health and psychic well-being as it used to be doesn’t mean that Pastner and company get a pass, especially if this becomes another season in which the Tigers are no longer a factor in the national rankings. We have this uncomfortable feeling — shared by many sports pundits — that it’s this year or else for Josh. Like him or not, the Svengali who preceded Pastner got Memphis sports fans spoiled in that regard.

In other ways, we seem to be, well, getting there. Against all expectations, the Bass Pro Shop version of our iconic Pyramid turned out to be just the kind of new and shiny tourist draw that we hoped it would be. Not that it helped turn things around for Mayor A C Wharton or the irredeemably tainted Robert Lipscomb, the two personages who did the most to arrange the presence of that magnetic bauble on our riverfront.

Wharton’s elected successor as mayor, the thus far likeable and city-government-wise Jim Strickland, will start out his term in January. Like any political honeymooner, he’ll have the community’s best wishes at his disposal — for a while, at least.

He would do well, however, to remember that his predecessor, in two city elections within the last decade, won elections with 60 to 70 percent of the vote. That number came all the way down to 22 percent on Election Day this year.

Even as we are enjoying the successes of the football Tigers and the Grizz and the hope that it will spill over into the political life of our community, it pays to remember: The scoreboard can change in a hurry. Let’s hope it doesn’t. We like the idea of being on a winning streak.