The end of summer

[thisnewday]

The DCI summer tour is in its final two days. Semi-finals, for the top 17 World Class corps will begin this afternoon at 5 PM on the Bloomington campus of the University of Indiana. Finals will take place tomorrow and will include the top 12 corps from the semi-finals. The Dubuque Colts are currently ranked 14th.

How often we've heard it said, in those notoriously lame attempts to console the runners-up in life, that it's not the winning or losing that's important but, rather, how the game is played. In a culture that pays millions to star athletes and routinely subjects grade school kids to high-stakes testing, that's a hard sale to make, especially to a cynic like myself.

Somehow, DCI and the Colts are different. Once you've experienced a moment of their intensity, once you grasp the magnitude of the dream, and understand what these kids do in their pursuit of it, then it's possible, if only for that moment, to believe...