Streeter: EA College Football 25 is out and I'm 12 again

It’s been 84 years...

Well, 11. And I’ve also never seen Titanic. But what I have done is run two Xbox 360s, four controllers and six separate copies of EA Sports’ NCAA 14 into the ground playing that game.

And at the grand age of 23 years old with all that hardware sitting in my first apartment, I got to fire up EA Sports’ next installment of the series: College Football 25. At 1 p.m. on July 15, I sat down at the folding table from Costco I’ve been employing as a desk since I moved — don’t pass judgement, it’s incredibly utilitarian as a Thanksgiving dining room table, desk and place where clutter generally collects.

Saying loading up the game for the first time brought a tear to my eye would be a two-fold lie. The first is that it didn’t and the second is that I was simply too excited to be able to process any other emotions other than anxiously tapping my foot until the clock finally struck 1.

Then, in an instant, I was smacked upside the head with the biggest wave of disappointment I could possibly imagine.

A notification across the screen that said, “It’s a full house in here,” and being told that there were simply too many people who did exactly what I had done and crashed the game. More waiting ensued in what could be most dramatically described as torture.

Since then, I’ve played a disturbing number of hours, consumed countless videos on YouTube to figure out how to actually succeed in the game and liked more memes on Twitter than I can recall.

I am by no means a good person to listen to video game opinions and criticisms from. I’ve got nothing intelligent to say from a reviewer’s perspective because I am the furthest thing from someone who has the qualifications to do that.

What I am is — in the best way possible — reverted back to the same kid I was when NCAA 14 came out. I remember getting that game very distinctly.

Admittedly, I was a late bloomer when it came to being a sports fan and even later in my love of college football. Other than going over to a family friend’s house to watch Sunday Night Football, my consumption of the sport was limited. Until one day my mom, who is likely finding out she’s been mentioned in a story as she’s reading this, came home with a copy of NCAA 14 and put it into my hands.

I’m not sure the kind of monster she realized she created when she did that, but had it not been for that video game at 12 I’m not sure if I’d be the sports junky I am at 23.

I learned to understand the sport on a deeper level. From hours and hours of playing Dynasty mode I could explain what a mesh concept is, how read option works, the differences in run blocking schemes and — most importantly — why it was always more fun to recruit an athlete to play quarterback.

For the next 11 years I’d be playing that game. We suffered casualties along the way, like the minimum three times my younger sister accidentally tipped over the console and the disk would need to be replaced or a copy being lost when I moved to college. But it was always a place of community amongst me and my friends, some of our best inside jokes were created around it — shoutout former West Virginia wide receiver Stedman Bailey and the six people on earth who will get that joke.

And while I’m not sure anything will top the nights after going barhopping with friends in college to come home and play Air Force vs. Idaho in the Kibbie Dome or the joy I felt when my sports editor at the best student newspaper on the west coast offered me his extra copy, the new game has taken up the mantle that was seemingly never going to need replaced.

The community.

I’m back to where I was for all those years. I’m still sitting in a living room playing the game, trash talking my friends and making bets for what the loser has to do. Who cares that one of them is in Texas, the other Washington and the third in Louisiana.

We grew up, we couldn’t play the old game online anymore because they stopped servicing it and people got rid of their old consoles.

But the new game, all 11 years in the making, caught up to us and sent me right back to middle school.

Does it have its flaws? Probably. Kicking is too hard no matter how much effort I put into it. Sometimes ASU’s mascot Sparky shows up to Sun Belt games to seemingly insult my Texas State dynasty while we get ran out of our own stadium by James Madison. The team builder won’t let me download my Sacramento State uniforms I spent hours working on.

But at the end of the day, I had rose colored glasses on about NCAA 14. They never came off, just replaced by 11-year younger ones.

So do it. Go buy the game. Buy the console if you have to and call up your friends who you used to battle it out with until the early hours of the morning. Be a teenager again and sink too much time into a video game.

It was worth the wait and worth every penny.

But now I have to go. The Bobcats need me in the race for the Sun Belt championship and a fight with the computer-controlled University of South Alabama over a three-star defensive tackle named Shaquille Loudermilk.