There's a day in July when it turns. Nothing marks it. The course is green, the round is ordinary, and then you notice the light going gold an hour earlier than it used to. And you start counting.
You count backward from the first frost. You count the weekends you have left. Then you subtract the ones already gone—the trip, the wedding, the Saturday it's going to rain and you don't know it yet. What's left is a number. It's smaller than you'd let yourself believe.
That's mid-season. Not the middle of the calendar—the middle of the feeling. May didn't have arithmetic. May was a door propped open. Every round implied a hundred more behind it. You skipped a twilight nine without thinking, because there'd always be another.
There won't always be another. There's this one, and then a countable few, and then brown grass and a garage and a long winter of thinking about it.
The obsessed already know this. It's why we play the Tuesday evening nine when we're tired. Why we go out in the heat, in the wind, off a bad night's sleep. Not to chase a score. Because the season is finite, we've finally done the math, and the only honest answer to a shrinking number is to spend it.
So spend it. Go play the round you'd have skipped in May. The light's still good for a few more weeks. Then it isn't.
— NO ONE MADE YOU LOVE THIS GAME.