All I could think about before 4th and 13 was how long the freaking offseason was going to feel. Somewhere between Bert Auburn’s wide-right kick and his leftward doink off the upright, I had accepted that Texas was going to lose to Arizona State.
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I was already talking to my skin, asking it to “please be thicker.” The onslaught of verbal Horns Down trash talk in the coming months was going to be awful. I didn’t like that I’d mentally surrendered, but the Peach Bowl no longer felt like the “play with your food” type of game Texas has earned a master’s degree in under Steve Sarkisian. It might have felt like that when Texas was up 24-8, but after that, it went from “I’ve seen this movie before against Arkansas and Texas A&M” to full-on body horror. It was more than a bad third quarter or a superior team sleepwalking against its opponent—it felt cosmically cruel.
It seemed as though the Sun Devils had sold their souls to Lucifer to steal the Peach Bowl from the Longhorns. There was nothing I, nor Dorian Gray, could do to reverse the slow decay of Texas’ season before my horrified eyes. Swallowing this loss would’ve been the worst kind of bitter, and I doubt I would have washed the pill down by August.