Today we start to get answers about the San Francisco 49ers

One of the best aspects about Niners Nation is that the environment is created by fans, for fans. Many of us who write for the site have sophisticated analytical skills; others have prose comparable with the quality you might find in a beat writer or reporter. Yet, we marshal those skills in a way that (we hope) best facilitates the average 49er fan. Or, at least, that's how I understand my role here. Maybe others have a different understand, though I suspect there is some overlap.

Anyway, that fact allows me to write stuff that wouldn't really have a place elsewhere - and I'm grateful for that. This article is one of those articles. It won't be the best thing I've written, or the best thing you've read on this site. But, I think it's true for today.

I'm really excited to watch the game tonight.

Yes, the offseason has been, at least for me, abysmal. I'm also in team pessimist: I'm not so sure that the team can recover from a host of issues afflicting them. But, darn it, I'm certainly going to love watching them try! And today is the first step in that process.

Today, instead of pouring over vague tweets about the events of a practice, we get to see actual football; instead of going line-by-line through practice reports, we get to watch our o-line clash into somebody else's d-line. Today we get football.

And, hopefully with it, we start getting answers. This team has presented us with numerous questions throughout the offseason - too many to list here, but we all know what they are. We've been talking about them for an entire offseason. Well, now they start to get answered.

Maybe we won't like the answers we get; hopefully we will. But now, we get to actually watch football. And that is the best way to start getting the weird aftertaste of this offseason out. And then, once the game is over, we know that there's only one more week to wait for another one. That's a pretty cool thing.

So, yeah, I'm pretty excited today, dumpster-fire-offseason notwithstanding.