By MONTE DUTTON

It’s been quite the football weekend. I’m sort of overwhelmed.

Clinton won. Laurens won. Furman won. Presbyterian won.

(Oh, wait. This just arrived via Pony Express. King beat Laurens Academy, 26-22.)

Thornwell lost, 59-0, to a team called the Anderson Cavaliers. Oh, the Saints are just starting out. You can’t have everything.

It rained in Woodruff and Laurens. It was worth it. Both the Red Devils and the Raiders are going for three in a row on Friday night. Who’d have thought?

Meanwhile, no matter what happens, no matter how many games there are, it always takes me to 3 or 4 in the morning to get done choosing and processing photos, compiling, writing, laying out copy and placing ads. Sometimes it’s a technical glitch. Sometimes it’s looking up missing information.

This time it was the University of Colorado. I see why Coach Prime’s games are all on TV. They are completely unpredictable. Anything can happen. In that commercial, Nick Saban says, “An elephant would be scarier.”

No. It wouldn’t.

Colorado led 29-0 at halftime. I did some work. All of a sudden, Stanford – yes, the Stanford that had lost four straight games, not the Samford that Furman would beat – was coming back. The Cardinal won in overtime. It was 2 a.m.

Writers of my age are not particularly adept at multitasking. Furman played at Samford at the same time Presbyterian played Dayton. I was switching back and forth, consulting the streaming stats, writing some copy as the games went along and several times stroking incorrect keys that briefly created mayhem, as if there wasn’t already enough.

Then I watched South Carolina play Florida. I have no intense devotion to the Gamecocks, but I’ve probably been unusually interested in them ever since I wrote about the Paladins playing there back in September. Maybe I want them to do well because it makes Furman look better. Maybe I really have no idea why. All I know about Southern Cal-Notre Dame and Oregon-Washington was from late-night SportsCenter.

The Panthers took a 14-0 lead in Miami. Yeah, right. I folded clothes, and when I came back, the Dolphins led, 28-14. Frank Reich reminds me of Norv Turner. What? Don’t remember Norv?

I switched to the NASCAR race. After a while, I figured I’d catch the end and switched to San Francisco-Cleveland. Ooh. Chance of an upset. Damned if the Browns didn’t win. I bet Warren Finney’s happy. He’s the only Browns fan and one of thousands of Red Devils fans I know.

Kyle Larson won the race in Las Vegas, where apparently most people went to the Raiders game. I made the right call. The end was all that was interesting, as best I can gather. I did enjoy the acrobatic aluminum rim that fled Ty Gibbs’ Toyota.

My favorite announcer’s comment was, “The cars are spread out all over the track because they’re all going the same speed.”

How can that be?

Perhaps I was nonplussed by Sunday because I was tired and broke and hard to impress. It was not my mood on Friday and Saturday.

On Friday night, I was singing in the rain. (Okay, it was the national anthem.) When I left Woodruff, I couldn’t see because my glasses were covered in moisture, and I couldn’t dry them off because my clothes were soaking wet. I finally made some headway with the shirt underneath my hoodie, but I was slightly worried about being pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving.

Oh, I’m soaked all right, Officer.

It doesn’t rain at high-school football games like it used to. If the forecast is threatening, they’ll postpone it, and if there’s lightning in the next county, they’ll stop it. Whoever “they” happen to be, they know more than I, but I once covered a game at Hillcrest in which it never rained a drop, but the game didn’t start till after 9.

This was a light rain in the former half and a soaking one in the latter. The only thunder was Kadon Crawford ramming the Wolverines’ defense. Earl Campbell would have smiled.

Laurens’ win over Wade Hampton was over before Clinton’s. I heard Raiders voice Doug Holliday’s report on the radio. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known that, after a post-score series of yellow-flag misbehavior and excessive celebration, the Generals tried a two-point conversion from their own 47-yard line.

Of course, they could have opted for a 70-yard PAT try.

I know from experience that Samford quarterback Michael Hiers is trouble with a T that rhymes with P and stands for Pass, but Furman’s defense sacked him nine times, and Tyler Huff was Tyler Huff and Dominic Roberto just pounded the Bulldogs into submission. It was a battle of wills – Samford also made a lot of big plays – but the Paladins were indomitable.

It was a marvelous football game because winning it was hard.

Life is hard / No matter where you go / It’s a tortured path / Tough row to hoe / When the wheels spin / Got a heavy load / Hoping I can get / To the paved road.

Presbyterian College got there, too, way up in Dayton, Ohio. Once I almost missed a plane because I switched planes in Atlanta and asked the airline employee where the gate to Daytona was and he sent me to the one for Dayton. I barely got on the right flight before they closed the door. My shirt was wet. Sitting next to me was Buddy Baker, rest in peace, who was highly amused. In a sense, I was almost a Dayton Flyer.

Getting back to the ballgame, it was tense. I was tense. I felt like a safecracker in Noir Alley. Dayton tied it after the Blue Hose once led by 17 points in the second half. In overtime, the Flyers’ field goal didn’t fly, and the one by PC’s exuberant freshman, Mack Mikko, did. Mack is from Newnan, Ga. Mikko is from Helsinki, Finland (not really).

This year the Blue Hose have been battling again.

The 49ers and Eagles lost. The Dolphins couldn’t lose because they were playing the Panthers.

Support the advertisers, and help keep the site – the game stories, the blogs, the photos – alive by making a donation to DHK Sports, P.O. Box 768, Clinton, S.C. 29325 or making a small monthly donation via Patreon. The Laurens County site is here. The Furman site is here.

Another way I can derive some revenue is if you purchase my books at MonteDutton.net. They’re quite entertaining in spite of the fellow who wrote them. Two of my novels, Cowboys Come Home and Lightning in a Bottle, are available in audio versions. The latest, The Latter Days, is about baseball.

Photo galleries are posted on Instagram @furmanatt and @laurenscountysports.

The next Fiesta Grande open mic is Wednesday, Oct. 18, at 8 p.m.