This was the week Latrobe should have returned to normal, but it's hard without a tangible starting point from which to return, such as the delicious abnormality of Steelers training camp coming and going as it had every summer for 54 years.
Fifty-four consecutive pandemic free years.
Thus the late August normality Saint Vincent College now achieves feels like abnormality, and it's not terribly delicious.
"We're doing everything differently now," said Father Paul Taylor, once a student here and now just beginning his second year as college president. "It's like there's an asterisk on everything. It's an alternative reality."
He really missed having training camp on campus; I can hear it in his voice. Not the logistical concinnation of it, not the cache certainly, not even necessarily the flood of cash it brought to businesses up and down adjacent Route 30. He misses it in his soul. Of course, in his soul. Near his office, there's a large photo of a crop of Steelers rookies with their hands together in the great Basilica's holy water font.
"I think not having the team here physically is really uniting us more spiritually," he explained. "Because we're all forced to do things differently, I don't get to see them, but I still feel close to them because this is their home just as Heinz Field is their home."
That sounds closer to the explanation for why I drove out there this past week. It's not accurate; it's just closer. The reason is probably better left to psychologists than to clerics, but it felt like it had something to do with the fact that I've gone there every summer for 35 years. It has more to do with the way you think about things.
The Benedictines who run Saint Vincent think in centuries. The Rooneys who run the Steelers think in generations. The players think in Instagram.
Even as I undertook the hard 40 miles between Pittsburgh and Unity Township in Westmoreland County, I wasn't thinking much of anything until I got to the Auto Tag Store on Route 30 just a few miles from campus. The Auto Tag Store has always had a marquee out front for some reason, I guess in case Beyonce decides to turn up one Friday night. On the marquee this past week was something I'd never seen on a marquee:
"Any thoughts??"
None, except you don't need that second question mark.
This is how writers think. They're the worst.
This part of 30 can never retain the same face from one summer to the next. Something's always changing. The Rodeway Inn finally has flat screens TVs according to that marquee. The giant inflatable character outside the mattress store looks too much like SpongeBob. The Eat 'n' Park that looked like it had been there since the '50s is now a nail salon. Dunkin' Donuts is hiring, because, uh, doughnuts, hello? There's another Sheetz going up where Geo's Restaurant and Lounge used to be, because there are currently only 93 Sheetz stores between Exit 68 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Ligonier, obviously. Geo's was a slightly out of the way roadhouse I used to favor if I'd been writing late because it was often quiet and I could hear "SportsCenter" over the comfortable murmur of the dimly lit bar.
Geo's had a marquee too. One night as I pulled in to the lot out front, I looked at the marquee and it read "KARAOKE!" Not sure you're aware of this, but there's a state law that says if you have karaoke and you have a marquee, you must put "KARAOKE!" on the marquee. That's so people going by on the highway know to just keep driving. To save themselves. It's a public service.
But I thought, "They don't mean tonight, right?"
I pushed through the door and there, where the pool table used to be, was a lonely looking man behind a mic stand free-styling the Simon and Garfunkel standard "Scarborough Fair," but in fluent yinzer.
Oh no.
"ORR yew gon' dahn Scorrbro Fair?
"Porsley sage, Rosemareee ... 'n at."
Oh no.
"Remember me tew one who lives dahn 'ere."
OK I'm out.
It was perhaps the perfect musical antithesis of Chuck Noll conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on the Saint Vincent lawn one night some 30 years ago. A musician himself, Noll took the baton not in the manner of someone performing a harmless public relations stunt, but as an opportunity to be relished, that he took seriously. In the fading August sunlight, his sunburned face bathed in appreciation, the Emperor rarely looked happier at training camp.
This past week, even though its students have arrived for in-person instruction and the occasional Frisbee flew over the sprawling emptiness of four football fields, Saint Vincent looked naked from the road. Somehow out of place. In its own eternal place.
"We missed the character of the fans we couldn't have," Father Taylor said. "The character of the camaraderie of the players, separated from Pittsburgh, being able to come together on quiet campus evenings."
He's worked like a dog this summer to situate Saint Vincent's staff, students and curriculum around a pandemic, relying heavily on discipline and self-sacrifice. In a bastion of Benedictine monasticism, it's a better bet here than in a lot of places. And he's got way too much to do to listen to my ruminations.
I headed back to the Turnpike, where the Irwin to Monroeville toll is now $1.50 for 10 miles. I think when I started making this trip, the Turnpike used to pay you.
Can you even have a Steelers season absent a Saint Vincent launch?
Should you, given the COVID-19 risks?
From a spot so far from normal, I guess we'll see.
