Finally.

The kids are back in school. The oldest — and a huge reason this site came into being — is going into her senior year.

That meant a spring and summer visiting various campuses and evaluating what she wants from a university and which ones to apply. Surprisingly, Pitt did make her list. I don’t know if it will be where she chooses to go; but it’s nice to know years of indoctrination have had an impact.

I won’t lie, this game has me nervous. Not because Pitt could lose. I mean, that’s just standard. It was thirteen years ago that Pitt started the season with a night game against Virginia on Labor Day weekend. Pitt came away with the win, but there wasn’t a lot to love about the season. To say nothing of the fact that the next night we had a fire break out in the basement of our house. So, so many memories.

Let’s hit on a few topics.

Pitt lost a running back as redshirt freshman Mychale Salahuddin has decided to transfer. It appears to be a mutual decision as Salahuddin has struggled to comeback from offseason knee surgery.

Salahuddin was a top RB recruit and the highest ranked recruit in Pitt’s 2018 class. But he was already buried on Pitt’s depth chart for this season. Running back is one of the few spots for Pitt that is exceptionally deep. It’s always a little uncomfortable to lose a kid that was highly recruited, but it looks to be best for both sides.

I never got around to saying much about Pitt’s return to the proper colors and the Script Pitt back in April. It was a poorly kept secret, but still much welcomed. There was an Athletic article this week on return of the colors/script; and the attention to clearing out all the dark colors and prior logos.

Yep. Yep, it is. Same goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of signage, banners, decals, carpeting, flags — if it’s a Pitt day at Heinz Field and there’s a logo within eyeshot, it’ll be “game royal and university gold.” If April 7 was graduation day for Pitt’s rebranding project — two years of work with Nike reconnected the school with its classic colors and introduced a new Panther head logo, among a fleet of other fresh uniforms and marks — Saturday is the first day of work.

“(Athletic director Heather Lyke) had this as Day 1,” Spears said. “’How do we get (the new color and logo) figured out?’”

For Lyke, it’s an ongoing process. A week earlier, she stopped by the locker room and noticed some outdated material.

“Next thing you know, I’m redoing a whole office,” Abrams said. “Things like that happen, and it’s all for the benefit of the cause.”

Think about Abrams’ word choice for a second. A “cause” is short of a “quest,” maybe, but it’s no small thing. There’s a level of dedication, of stakes, baked into the cake. It isn’t just important to the athletic department. It’s vital. And that’s not subtext — it’s the text itself.

“It’s essential and it’s critical to who we are,” Lyke said on reveal day. “I think there’s a sense of pride in these colors. Kids want to wear retro for big games because it matters. If you look good, you play good. There’s something to that. I also felt it unifies our campus, it unifies our alumni base, it unifies the students and it’s what people like. Instead of every day saying ‘What are we going to wear today?’ this is the answer.”

The fact that AD Lyke worked with Nike nearly from the day she arrived to fix the colors and the look of Pitt says something about recognizing the easiest fix, and yet the time it takes to make it really happen in one fell swoop.

Two years later, after three visits to Portland, Ore., three more major conference calls and more than 200 non-disclosure agreements with retailers, the work was unveiled — and it was far from just a color swap. There was a new Panther head, and a Panthers script, and more of the script “P” used by the baseball team. There was a font set, and a numeral set, and visual cues to the Cathedral peppered throughout. Nike, Spears said, was enamored with the building.

(It’s worth noting that the panther head debuted to at least some criticism. It’s also worth noting that doing anything distinctive with that particular mascot is next to impossible — though Pitt either pulled it off or came close enough. When your team is called the Panthers — crazy as it sounds — you should probably have at least one logo incorporating the actual animal. Plus, anecdotal as this may be, people seem to have warmed up to it, which is Spears’ experience, too. “So many people came up to me early, like, ‘Hey, Christian, I don’t know if I like it,’” he said. “Now a couple months later, they’re like, ‘Wow man, this has so grown on me.’”)

Purely anecdotal, but I need to hit on the new Panther logo. When someone contacted me with the image of the new logo a few weeks ahead of the reveal, I was less then charitable about it. It looked like the Panther was ready to sneeze. I called it “Sinus Infection Roc.”

Needless to say, the logo was not for or about me. I took my son to the spring game, and he absolutely loved it, and the shirt he wanted (and got) was the royal blue with the gold Panther head.

And boy was there pent-up demand for this color scheme.

There’s no reason not to make the change; it’s already worked. When Nike’s fiscal year closed on June 30, Pitt was 37th in total sales out of about 1,100 Nike properties, Spears said. That was less than two months into the rebrand.

“I think if you give us a full year with all the new marks and logos, we’re going to be in the top 25,” he said. “And then when we are, you can really start asking for things.”

Such as?

“When you go into the store or you go online, you could be able to buy a Pitt logo Nike shoe, like you can for Alabama. We want to be able to do that, and not just through our own mechanism. We have an ‘H2P’ shoe, and we work with Nike on it, but we do it. I want them to do it. We’re on the cusp. That’s the goal. When we made all these decisions, it was, ‘Let’s be a top-25 Nike school.’ And I think we’re right there.”

Of course, you know what really helps with those sales? Winning games. I’d really like to see that.

So, in case you missed it. The ACC Network has debuted in the last week. The main hold-out remains Xfinity/Comcast. The major carrier for the East Coast. So there is pressure on both sides to get a deal done soon. It doesn’t mean there will be one, though. Both sides feel they have some sort of leverage.

In the big picture it will get done. These things always do. There will be the hand-wringing. Anger, etc.

There will also be the usual doomsayers who pretend they don’t have a vested interest in trying to denigrate the ACC Network (just as there were for the SEC Network and the Big Ten Networks). But  with ESPN’s muscle behind it, the pain is mainly short term.

I would totally buy this if it was only in the correct colors.