Total Eclipse Of The Heart

The first eclipse must have really freaked out the people who were alive back then, whenever it was.

Presumably, this was well before a great knowledge of astronomy existed. It probably seemed like it went from day to night to day very quickly, leaving everyone wondering if this would be the new normal.

"Hey, what the heck just happened?"
"No idea. I'm still trying to figure out how to make fire."
"Well, whatever it was, it was strange — though it might make a good song."

That, of course, is Bonnie Tyler's 1983 mega-hit "Total Eclipse Of The Heart," which was her first single and which sold more than six million copies. Who wrote it? The same guy who wrote every wildly creative and out of the ordinary song in the 1970s and 1980s — Jim Steinman, who 1) wrote all of Meat Loaf's songs and 2) was the brother of longtime Columbia sports information director Bill Steinman. 

Ah, but TigerBlog digresses. Did you enjoy the eclipse?

One thought that TigerBlog had regarding the eclipse is this: What would have happened had it been two days earlier? Or one day earlier? 

Think about how many athletic events there were outside over the weekend. Would they have played through the eclipse? Would they have had to take a break? 

There were no Major League Baseball games scheduled yesterday afternoon. The only ESPN+ college event yesterday afternoon was Boston University at Colgate, which started at noon. 

There was one Princeton team who competed yesterday afternoon — the women's golf team, who was the Wolfpack Match Play at North Carolina state. The event itself is a pretty cool one, with eight teams that were all to play three rounds, with five head-to-head singles matches to determine who wins each round, with two matches yesterday and one today. The field includes four teams in the top 51 of the national rankings.

Princeton opened with a loss to Wake Forest, the third-ranked team in the country, yesterday in the early match, which put Princeton into the consolation bracket with a 1:00 start. This would mean prime eclipse time.

So would they keep playing?

TB reached out to Princeton coach Erika DeSanty to see what the answer was, and it was this: "We are!! Yes. We all have glasses."

So there you have it. 

As for the BU-Colgate softball game, TB asked Raiders' Director of Athletics Yariv Amir the same question. Will they keep playing? 

His response was the perfect administrative response: "That's why we started early."

Ah, but what if the game ran long and overlapped with the eclipse? 

"I guess we'll see," Amir said. 

Somewhere in that response was a great punchline. Ultimately, BU won the game before the eclipse started.

TigerBlog walked around the campus yesterday in the early afternoon, and it was a weird phenomenon, almost like the beginning of some apocalyptic horror movie. People were gingerly looking skyward, almost like they were expecting to see space aliens descending, weapons already firing.

Of course, there was humor too. As TB walked past the chapel, he heard one student call to another, and they had this actual exchange, which ended when one pointed to the sky:

"Are you going to watch the eclipse?"
"I guess. Where is it?"
"Up there I guess." 

As for the actual eclipse, TB went upstairs around 3 and found a large crowd of coaches, administrators and athletes in the general area of the front of Jadwin Gym. As you might have expected, it got darker and colder and then lighter and warmer.

It never got as dark as TB thought it would. He was expecting pitch-blackness, and that didn't come close to happening.

And yes, BrotherBlog, he did look through the glasses that he got up on Nassau Street earlier in the day. TB isn't quite sure he really believes the whole "your eyes will be damaged if you look up" but he wasn't tempting things.

If TB read correctly, the next total solar eclipse here will be in 2079, when he'll be approaching 116 years old.

He'll have to see that one from the other side — with his after-life approved glasses, of course.