Hokies hope football will help their school heal

The media are here to cover 12 ACC football programs, but we linger around the preseason favorite, not because they're the favorite. It's because their banquet-room tables at the ACC Football Kickoff are the ones with the maroon and orange VT logo. It's three months later, and still we, or at least I, want to hear how Virginia Tech is doing, how it is coping with the event that created the need for Page 2.

We have questions for the favorite, sure, but we also have questions about April 16, about how football can help uplift a school in need of a pick-me-up in the worst way. Maybe we're there, so many of us, from papers and Web sites outside the Commonwealth of Virginia, because we want to be, because we want to grieve with Virginia Tech.

In that banquet room Monday, standing around Frank Beamer's table because all the seats were taken, I couldn't bring myself to leave. The plan was to write about Virginia Tech, but still listen plenty to other coaches.

Time got away. Listening to Beamer, and listening to Virginia Tech's players the previous day, I found it difficult to leave. I started at each spot and spent too long at both.

I'm supposed to flip through the media guides of the teams, to get familiar with them, and I did on a few, or I used them to look up specific facts.

But Page 2 of Virginia Tech's guide, chilling yet reverent, stopped me.

The NCAA has rules for the number of pages and color pages in media guides, which really are recruiting guides. Virginia Tech still has its NFL alumni, including Michael Vick, on the back cover, but it didn't use Page 2 to pitch its program.

Instead of All-America candidates are the names of Seung-Hui Cho's victims, all 32 of them.

I read them, over and over, on the page with a panorama of a campus memorial service. At the top, it says "We Remember." At the bottom, "We are Virginia Tech."

Virginia Tech opens the season Sept. 1 at home against East Carolina. The ESPN GameDay crew will be there, not because of the game, but because of the story.

Beamer doesn't mind the big show; Virginia Tech fans don't mind it. They're ready to move forward, ready to think positive thoughts. Football provides positive thoughts in Blacksburg.

"There's not a lot that goes on in Blacksburg," lineman Duane Brown said. "I'm just being real. Not a lot that goes on. Football is a great tradition, and everybody's looking forward to that."

Some will say it's only a game, but it's more than that at Lane Stadium, more than that this fall in Blacksburg.

"I think Virginia Tech people are very hungry to be together and to rally and show their togetherness and show their caring and respect for each other," Beamer said. "This guy shot people; he had no respect. I think respecting other people and other people's rights is a big, big thing. I feel like as a university, as a crowd in Lane Stadium, that we'll show more respect to the opponent and we'll care more about each other and be more together than ever."

Hokies everywhere will remember the names on Page 2. But once the ball is kicked at noon on Sept. 1, the page will be turned.

Sports editor Neil Amato can be reached at 343-2263 or neil.amato@starnewsonline.com.