This is a placeholder column. It exists so the site has something to show, and so you can see what a finished piece looks like before you write a real one. Delete it whenever you like — the file is src/content/columns/2026-09-11-it-is-not-going-to-be-our-year.md, and nothing else depends on it.

Here is what the formatting does, so you know what you have to work with.

A paragraph is just a block of text with a blank line before and after it. You do not need to do anything special to make one. Bold is two asterisks on either side of a word, and italics is one. A link looks like this, with the words in square brackets and the address in parentheses right after.

Subheadings look like this

Two pound signs and a space. Use them when a column has real sections, which most columns do not. A single pound sign is reserved for the title, and the title comes from the top of the file rather than the body, so you will never need one.

A blockquote gets a line down the left side. Useful when you are quoting a coach saying something absurd in a postgame presser, which is most of them.

Lists work the way you would expect:

• A dash and a space starts a bullet.
• Another one continues it.
• They are worth using sparingly. A column made of bullets is a memo.

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Three dashes on their own line make that horizontal rule above, which is a decent way to signal a turn in a piece without writing a transition.

That is the whole toolkit. Everything else is just writing.