Don’t look now, but the wheels are coming off of the Dabo Swinney bandwagon. Going into this weekend’s match-up with Wake Forest, Clemson has a record of 2-3, and if you’ve listened to any of the local sports talk radio you’d swear that life as we knew it was at an end. Cue “All Along the Watchtower” or “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” on your collective iPods, Clemson fans.

But here’s the thing: if sports fans ran the world, everything would be given up on halfway. I recently read “American Gospel” by Jon Meacham, which has absolutely nothing to do with sports except that it kinda does, at least in terms of sports fans. You read the part about the Founders being fearful that sunshine patriots would buckle under the first signs of strain and challenge and you think “hmm, that sounds awfully familiar.”

Any time your team loses, it’s the end of the world: massive layoffs are called for, from the tightwad owner who won’t pay for talent, the general manager who generally manages to screw even the simplest calculations up, and the manager who suffers a coma before every game in terms of his sports knowledge, all the way down to the players on the field, the prima donna big star whose salary demands soak up the team’s resources. They’re all scoundrels, and they all need to walk the plank. Next thing you know, we get a win and they’re all a glorious band of brothers, putting aside their many differences to get past the hurdles thrown in their way. And so it goes, this manic-depressive swing that typifies most sports fans.

Like anything in life, it’s easy to overreact when something goes wrong (or right) for your team). To me, Dabo is inextricably linked to Obama, because both came on the clock at about the same time (Dabo got his interim slot in October of last year, a month before Obama got elected). Both got handed a raw deal in terms of what their predecessor left behind. Both had brief, almost transitory moments of brilliance and inspiration, followed by the cold realities of the limits of their power. Both had arguably brilliant-yet-ridiculous slogans (“change we can believe in,” “are you all in?”). And both are suffering some serious hangover pains from their honeymoon swoon.

If there’s any solace for Clemson fans this season, the ones who didn’t get too big for their britches thinking that “this is our year,” it’s in the stats: we’re not losing in blow-outs but in pretty close games. Sure, there’s the argument that getting so close and coming up short is worse than never getting close at all, but it’s a trip in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. We ain’t in a league with Florida or Southern California yet, my friends. But when this season is over, and the dust has settled, I think it’s fair to say that we might be shaking off the last cobwebs of the Tommy Bowden era. You know, leading by twenty points at halftime and then deciding heck, we should let the other fellows have a chance. Those days are (knock on wood, avoid cracks on a sidewalk, pick up a penny heads up) over. This is what we call “growing pains,” and they’ll get a lot worse before they get better. But for those willing to stay on the bandwagon every time it takes a wrong turn or goes off a cliff on a wrong-way street, it could be one heck of a ride.

I reserve the right to be totally wrong, of course. I mean, I am a Clemson fan, after all.