It's College Football Season: so here's how to make football season one to remember with a Senior.

Ask any Georgia man of a certain age about Herschel Walker and Georgia Bulldog's the 1980 season and watch his whole face change. He'll tell you where he was. He'll tell you what the announcer said. He might tell you something you've heard forty times, and that's fine, because on a Saturday in October the telling is the point.

College football does something for the people who love it. It marks time. It gives the week a shape. Sunday through Friday is just waiting, and then the whistle blows.

If your dad or your mom is one of those people, football season is worth protecting. It doesn't stop mattering because someone moved into a personal care home. If anything, it matters more, because it's a piece of who they've always been.

Game day is a mood, so treat it like one

Here's the thing nobody tells you. The joy isn't only in the game. It's in the ritual around it.

The jersey comes out of the drawer. Somebody makes the little sausages. The pre-game show is on too loud. Kickoff is at 3:30 but the day started building at noon.

We try to keep that rhythm going here at Joy. Mellissa Daniel, our executive director, is a Georgia girl, and she understands that you don't just flip on a TV and call it a party. You set the room. You get the snacks out early. You let people wear the colors even if the game's on the road.

When you visit on a game day, lean into the whole thing. Bring the boiled peanuts. Wear your team shirt, even if it's the wrong team (a little friendly trash talk keeps a person sharp). Ask who they're playing and let the answer turn into a story.

And if your parent has trouble following the score or keeps asking who's winning, don't correct them like it's a test. Just answer, every time, easy. "We're up by ten, Daddy. Third quarter." You'll say it six times. Say it warm all six.

When the memory fades but the love doesn't

This is the part that surprises families the most. A person can forget your name for a second and still holler at a bad call.

Football lives deep. The fight song, the colors, the feeling of a Saturday, those are stored somewhere the newer memories can't reach. We've watched residents who struggle to recall lunch light right up when the marching band comes on. The body remembers standing for the anthem. The mouth remembers the words.

So use it. If conversation feels hard lately, put the game on and let it carry the visit. You don't have to fill the silence. You can just be two people on a couch, mad at the refs together.

Mellissa and our team pay attention to what moves each person, and for a good number of our folks, it's this. Fall Saturdays give us an easy in. A shared thing. A reason to gather in the common room with the good chairs pulled close.

A small idea for the season

Make a plan for one game you'll watch together, start to finish, this fall. Pick it now. Put it on your calendar like it's an appointment, because it is.

Bring the food he likes. Sit through the whole thing, even the boring stretch in the second quarter when nothing happens. Let him tell you about 1980 again.

My family's last time watching UNC play basketball with our grand father, we didn't know it was going to be the last but it was a national championship game. We lost but the have the memory. You won't remember watching it with random strangers at a bar or some friends.

If you're looking at senior living options around here and your parent is the kind of person whose whole week bends around kickoff, ask whoever you tour with how they handle game day. A place that gets it will light up when you ask. A place that doesn't will look at you funny.

We're a small personal care home in Loganville, and around here, Saturdays in the fall sound like a stadium. Go Dawgs, mostly. But we've got a few who root otherwise, and we let them, bless their hearts.