Andrew Luck Threw A Football

Somewhere among the granite mountain forests of Northern California, lurking around the hordes of bleach blonde , tribal leg tattooed, flavor town devouring, Sublime with Rome listening, pot picking weirdos is a hairy, anthropomorphic bipedaler, forever frozen and known thanks to an unsuspecting summertime stroll.

In that Scottish lake, a curled smudge, a black tar loogy, a blemish in black and white, rears its head and protrudes from the choppy waters. It’s an underwater creature lost in a time and place it doesn’t understand, thousands of years away from home, all alone, all on its own, forever swimming in search of souls who hopped on Charon’s ferry hundreds of thousands years ago.

Up there in the sky, a million miles away, little globs teleport back and forth, moving more like a house cat terrorizing AAA battery created lasers than combustion generated movement. It’s all blinks and zips, not seen as often since the creation of the cell phone, but still they have to exist. Maybe we’re the ones who have lost our ability to see. Infinity is too enormous for there to be nothing.

On an unassuming field, in a private facility, a neckbeard wearing swamp creature is seen doing something he was born to do but hasn’t done in so, so, so long. He’s been stuck tossing weights, books, medicine balls, paper balls, and water bottles. Anything other than a football.

Yet now he is actually throwing a football.

The cellphone video is far away. The red jersey is on. The number is the same. 12. He’s quickly shifting past the bean bag tossing faux pass rush, as if the rushers on the edge he’s so used to are still around. Making them miss, he plants and does something he hasn’t done in so long: Throw a simple oblong ball to the right at what appears to be nothing.

If you take the cellphone video as undoctored truth, then yes, Andrew Luck is throwing a football again. For a while, he’s been a mythical creature, the unicorn of the NFL. A generational quarterback prospect who played like a generational quarterback prospect, taking an inept team to the playoffs, and even an AFC Championship Game, before a shoulder injury and the inability to do the most important part of playing quarterback, throwing the football, kept him watching with an earpiece plugged into his head. If you take the video as truth and Luck is able to start Week One, the Colts’ offseason was a disaster. Because with a quarterback of Luck’s caliber, any year when he’s healthy, the NFL Playoffs are a possibility. If he’s not healthy, even seeing Luck on the field again, in any week, is a win for the future, and the slow rebuilding the Colts appeared to have undertaken was the correct decision.

Whatever the truth is, I don’t care. I want to believe. I’m going to believe that Andrew Luck is healthy, able, and competently throwing the ball like it’s 2013 all over again. Football is better with good quarterback play. Luck is a good quarterback. Him healthy makes the NFL more interesting and entertaining. Additionally, Luck makes the AFC South more than just entertaining. It further cements it as being a good division, something that hasn’t happened since Kerry Collins played in Tennessee, Marcus Stroud and John Henderson were constipating the center of the line of scrimmage in Jacksonville, and Peyton Manning was orchestrating the field in Indianapolis.

Hopefully this isn’t merely a glimpse where the monster crawls back to the woods, lake, sky, or training room. Hopefully Luck is actually throwing the football, and yes, he will actually play football again, as early as 2018.