The van

 Just as Rock expected, Central Arkansas sports information director Steve East immediately recognized the vehicle, an equipment van Rock won with a bid of less than two-thousand dollars on govdeals.com. East laughed out loud when he saw it. "To tell you the truth, I didn't even know we sold it," he said. "It's been out here around the football field as long as I can remember."

It wouldn't stop

Television commercials that ran all day during coverage of the men's NCAA Basketball Tournament on CBS began to go haywire late in the evening. They gradually began to comment on themselves through a prolonged sequence of criticism and parody. There was some reason in place, one Rock thought involved a warning of worldwide or even universal catastrophe. He had never seen anything like it, and it wouldn't stop. He began to suspect Jim Nantz was drunk and fully responsible for this nearly insane circumstance.

Unimaginable

 A somewhat pretty local runner Rock had known for nearly ten years had been accused by multiple women of rape since1995, and evidence of her guilt seemed overwhelming. It was unimaginable, but there it was, easy to see, graphic and horrible. He spoke of it to his friend Elaine, who wondered how this woman had raped people when she was as young as thirteen years old. Rock understood the question, but he could not clear his mind of the nightmare before them. Neither could Elaine. "How is this possible?" she asked.

His first task

 It had become critical for Rock to get up and begin to prioritize every facet of his life. Moments later, shortly after he refilled his cat Joe's food bowl and as he sat in a maroon recliner with a spiral notebook in hand, Rock knew his first task was to call five horsemen at Oaklawn in Hot Springs. He had known from the night before how meaningful that was, but he was unprepared for the panic involved and how it had begun to seem like a matter upon which his very livelihood depended.

To properly seed

 This would, a short time later, help Rock to know he was awake rather than asleep and dreaming, but for the moment, as he lay in his front bedroom bed, he understood that his two-year-old housecat Joe was central to an effort to properly seed the first round of the four-school NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision playoffs. It was apparently an important issue since one of the four schools had a somewhat mediocre football team. Obviously, the other teams' connections wanted that school as a first-round opponent. Michigan head coach Don Shula, an NFL Hall of Fame inductee Rock admired as a child, was adamant about it and insisted Rock not let Joe out of the house.