By BILL HOWARD
pressbox1.com

So it's a late nite Friday, Nov. 16; I'm enjoying a lovely beverage - made from grapes and named for a region in France - and listening to pop tunes I recorded on a cassette from one of those Time-Life CD sets I bought weeks ago. Keep 'em 30 days and send 'em back and you pay only 10 bucks. Surprise, surprise. I sent 'em back and still got my credit card wrongly charged. Twice. On the phone yesterday the guy told me it had been rectified. We'll see.

Your intrepid webmaster Steele and I go back more than 25 years. Gosh, doesn't seem like more than 24.5. Okay, 23.9. In that time we've made many a trek to the hallowed grounds of Neyland Stadium to see our beloved (and sometimes disdained) Vols, the most recent being their (shocking) thrashing of Arkansas last week. I don't mind saying I went on record predicting exactly such a thrashing. Of Tennessee by the Razorbacks. If you're a fan then you know what Arkansas did to Carolina the week before, and how even the minimalist logic demanded such a dire prediction for the Vols.

I made a similar anti-Vol prediction the week of the Florida game in '01. The game was played on Dec. 1 because of 9-11. Tennessee was 9-1, but Rex Grossman had thrown for about 9 million yards that season, and the Vols had, as always, given up about that much through the air. I wrote in a column for the paper I was then writing for that there was no way Tennessee could win. None. In my column after the game I reported never being more glad to be wrong. Same last Saturday afternoon after the Vols' thoroughly impressive performance against the Hogs.

What made last week 10 times sweeter than it otherwise would have been is that I was in Fayetteville last year for the McFadden Mauling. Get this. The airline lost my bag, so I had to go to Walmart the day of the game and buy a bunch of new clothes. That night in the stadium we sat way up high and it was colder than you-know-what. I shivered thru the whole game. And I was with my brother and sister-in-law, who went three years to UA, and is a monster Hogs' fan. AND the final score of 31-14 was one of those not-as-close-as-the-score-indicates games (even tho it wasn't even very close). It was over by the middle of the second. After a last-second loss to LSU the week before, Tennessee desperately needed to beat Arkansas to right the ship, stay in contention for a BCS bowl, and further banish the '05 nightmare.

Well, to invoke an overused cliche (as opposed to an underused one), the Arkansas game deflated Tennessee's season balloon. In one week the Vols went from 7-1 and a top-10 ranking, to 7-3 and national has-been status. Subsequent wins over Vandy and (barely) Kentucky set the stage for a 10-win season if they could beat Penn St. in the Outback Bowl. I watched that game from my other brother's place in Norwalk, Conn. The cold, miserable drizzle in Norwalk that day matched the Vols' performance. 7-1 had become 9-4, which meant, of course, 2-3 in the final 5 games. And therefore the dreaded questions that would haunt Vol Nation all through the off-season.

So here I am, 12 hours before Vandy, wondering, hoping, confident yet ambivalent, eager and yet not without a certain dread, for the game to commence. So far this year Tennessee has looked like both David and Goliath, like the mighty and the meek, the lion and the lamb, the conquerors and the vanquished. Which of their manifold personas will take the field later today? I don't know. All I do know is that I'll be there and wishing Steele could make it back in for this one. My and Steele's Neyland history is quite a story. It spans more than 20 years and encompasses every imaginable high and low that a sports fan could experience. More on that next week. Until then, go Big Orange, go Rebs, and be careful about both those lovely beverages and the CD sets you order.

(Editor's note: Tennessee rallied to defeat Vanderbilt 25-24 Saturday, perhaps further fueling Mr. Howard's angst regarding his beloved/disdained Tennessee Vols.)

Bill Howard is a free-lance writer, columnist, propagandist and somewhat frustrated Vol fan, having written for a variety of publications.