Recounting a wild season ... through expense reports

Armanti Edwards and the Mountaineers shocked Michigan in the Big House to kick off a crazy season. AP

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My kingdom for some taxi receipts.

How do you know when you've waited too long to file an expense report? When the woman at a call-center in Bangalore informs you that "Your account is 71 days past due."

And so, on a recent evening, I made the lonely trudge to my office, there to confront the dreaded accordion folder, stuffed with receipts that long ago should have been taped to white sheets of typing paper (as per company policy) and sent to corporate headquarters. Wrestling these receipts to the ground, filling in the fields, I was reminded that ... it's seldom a good idea to drink the bottled water in one's hotel room.

I was also reminded of each and every trip from the most remarkable season I've ever covered for SI -- a campaign whose overarching lesson could be boiled down to such axioms as: "Be Afraid, Favorites. Be Very Afraid," and "None Of Us Has The First Clue."

Among the truths I held to be self-evident as recently as August:

• Colt McCoy belongs on everyone's Heisman short list.

• Michigan is the best team in the Big Ten, with Wisconsin a close second.

• The Fighting Irish? They won't be great this season, but they won't suck, either.

With these receipts serving as little mile markers for the '07 season, I decided to compose a column while preparing my expense report. Because, as Julie Andrews sings in one of her movies (not the one in which she appears topless): "In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun!"

Thereafter, "Every task you undertake, Becomes a piece of cake!"

Just as Appalachian State would be a piece of cake for Michigan on Sept. 1, the same day, according to my expense report, I paid $4 to cross the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. I was scheduled to cover Cal's game against Tennessee. What was I doing driving back to my house three hours before kickoff?

Obeying. En route to Berkeley, my phone went off. "Never mind Cal-Tennessee," my editor told me. "Have you heard about Michigan?"

New assignment: Reconstruct, from phone interviews, an account of App State's epic 34-32 upset of the Wolverines.

"We didn't see anything super special" on film, free safety Corey Lynch told me later that night. "They're athletes just like us. We respect 'em a whole lot, but we can play with 'em."

"We had nothing to be scared of," added Mountaineers quarterback Armenti Edwards. "We had nothing to lose, they had everything to lose. I was just hoping they'd would come out [on defense] with the same looks we saw on film."

Michigan obliged.

That was Edwards on ESPN2 last Friday night, eviscerating Richmond in a I-AA semifinal. In addition to rushing for an extraterrestrial 313 yards and four touchdowns, the sophomore completed 14-of-16 passes for 182 yards and another three scores.

Here is an incredibly gifted athlete in a system he was born to run. No shame in losing to those guys, I assure Wolverine partisans -- not to mock them, but to console them. Because a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

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