And in the end...The love you take is equal to the love you make.

Thank you for your patronship - your year-plus reading here on this blogsite (and to all you bloggers and wannabes, I heartily recommend BLOGSPOT: very used friendly and malleable for a free site!) and for some of you another year or more on the Facebook page that preceded it.

But this is the end of it for me. God's essentially given me an ultimatum, to pare away the things that are less important and focus what remaining strength I have on what's important: Him, family, my own health. And football comes in well behind all of those things, as it should.

I will continue to love football; I'll probably even continue to forecast games now that I have the tier system in place. But the weekly grind of publishing even as little as I've been writing has been taking too large a toll on me, and it's showing in my health and in my relationships with my children. And obviously that's not acceptable.

For the record, the last set of prognostications went well: we were 7-6-1 in the NFL, picked both winners in the CFL playoffs (although only Calgary beat the spread as predicted), and the college teams went 34-23 over both divisions. We were pretty good at this, you know?But that was never the point. It was fun.

Thank you most of all to my wife, who encouraged this venture from the start, knowing it was a passion and an avocation; I have to admit that some of the joy left this project after she died.

And thank you to you loyal readers - you may not have been large in number, but you've been wonderful and engaged throughout the entire time Following Football ACNC  has been out on the information highway. It's possible that this is simply an extended hiatus, and with time may come a way to resume this labor of love; my condition, however - myopathy with tubular aggregates - is degenerative, and not one I'm expected to "get better" from.

For now, then, it's "so long" instead of "goodbye". Ted Danson's character on Cheers told Shelly Long's character upon her departure, "Have a nice life." Diane was upset because it implied something was permanently finished; she intended to be back in six months. But Sam knew better. And after she'd closed the door behind her, he repeated what he knew he meant.

Have a nice life, folks.