The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and it all means that something great is just around the corner.

Really, I swear I could actually feel the change the other night. Although it might have just been that I forgot to put shorts on when I let my dog out at 1 a.m. Either way, once we hit this time of year, you can feel the chill in the air, the feeling of what's to come. You get that undeniable anxiety of waiting for the weekend, waiting for the only thing that truly makes fall great. (You know, besides the crisp clear days and the rusty foliage and all that other junk.)

Yes, it's finally here; it's football season.

I know, training camps for the pros and “fall” practices for our wonderful scholar athletes have been going on for weeks, but I try to not get too excited about anything until they start playing games.

I must admit, that kind of means I'm still jumping the gun with this column, because, really, preseason football doesn't count. I mean, it's basically just a bunch of uncontrolled scrimmages, where we get to see who might be the fourth-string weakside linebacker for the Detroit Lions and how many times an announcer can praise Tom Brady's leadership skills in the (maximum) two series he plays.

But if we're getting technical here, the NFL has started, and college is soon to follow. So, we can now say it's football season.

And that's definitely a great thing, because when it comes down to it, football season is far and away the best sports season for fans.

All hyperbole aside — actually, I take that back. Let's put all the hyperbole in the center here, because that's what makes football so great and what makes it like no other sport we follow in America. That and the ridiculous amount of stats that we can track.

(Tangent: The most obvious sign of football's popularity — you know, besides having the highest TV ratings and profits per franchise — has to be the obsession with fantasy football. So many people do it — and so many people do it obsessively to the point that checking a box score to find out if Maurice Jones-Drew rushed for a touchdown is way too similar to Albert Haynesworth tracking down a cheeseburger or JaMarcus Russell looking for his “grape drank.” That is to say it's an addiction.)

The basic format of the football season — one game a week for (hopefully, if you're team wins it all) roughly 25 weeks with one bye — allows for so much over analyzing and over hyping that each game feels like do-or-die for every team. We get so caught up in the “what's-happened-lately” of our teams that we really never use any perspective when evaluating what we're watching.

Look at the Broncos in 2009. After a terrific start, people were wondering if they were a Super Bowl contender, only to find out (pretty quickly, actually) that they were simply picking up lucky wins.

And I'm not saying this as a bad thing; It's really the opposite. Because, when it comes down to it, anything can happen from season to season in football. A few injuries to key players, and a really good team can easily go 9-7 and miss the playoffs (Pittsburgh in 2009). A few lucky bounces and over-achieving players for a very average team can mean an incredible run through the playoffs (the Jets in 2009).

At the beginning of the season, every team — well, maybe except the Lions and Rams — have reason to feel confident about what lies ahead. And that's why, each week our favorite teams play, we live and die with the result. Each game feels so important, and, really, they are in the scheme of a 16-game schedule.

This isn't baseball, where your team can lose 18-4 in the season-opener and you know they have 161 games to make it up.

This is football, and it gives me chills — even when I have pants on.