NASCAR's old-school fans are still trying to digest the sport's major race revamp announced Monday _ or, more often, spitting it out like a gallon of milk gone sour.
To which I say: Get over it, my friends. The past is not coming back.
The racing playoffs aren't going away. The Cup races at North Wilkesboro aren't coming back. On the plus side, your favorite driver no longer has a decent chance of dying at the racetrack.
Everyone who cares about racing has a "glory days" period in mind. For some, it is the wild-and-woolly 1950s. For some, it is the hard-charging 1970s, epitomized by the famous Daytona 500 fight of 1979.
For me, it is a year after I arrived at The Charlotte Observer, in 1995. Dale Earnhardt was the sport's black-hat, old-guard superstar in the black No. 3. Jeff Gordon _ derisively nicknamed "Wonder Boy" by Earnhardt _ was its 24-year-old young gun in the rainbow-colored No. 24. The two could hardly have been more different, and their rivalry was a remarkable thing to see.
In 1995, Gordon won seven races and finished No. 1 for the season. Earnhardt won five times and finished No. 2.
In the mid-1990s, I remember allowing three hours to navigate 20 miles from my house to Charlotte Motor Speedway on a race day. Sometimes that still wasn't enough.
But as Billy Joel once sang: "The good ole days weren't always good/And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems."
