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I knew this post was coming eventually, the one where I tell you I lost many hours and about three whole days this fall discovering and catching up on season 1 of Friday Night Lights. Days when the tears rolled down my cheeks episode after episode, my heart falling with each dropped pass and rising on the arc of a Hail Mary or launch over an end line, as I watched the Dillon Panthers battle the obstacles that only television dramas can create in their quest for one of the greatest accomplishments in sports, to become high school Texas state football champions.

I have many a good thing to say about the first season and a few bad things about the second—namely the lovable and lust-worthy wife of Coach Taylor acting nuts after having a child, the ludicrous and soporific murder plot, and the cheerleader, Layla, becoming a born again Christian, as if being a regular Texas Christian isn’t bad enough. But it always has been and always will be Tim Riggins that keeps me watching.

For it is Tim who comes onto Lyla with “I feel closer to God if I’m with you,” and Tim who seduces the new neighborhood MILF, and Tim who will save you from undergoing a shark transplant to fix your busted spine. He may be a raging alcoholic and dumb as only a football player with a rally girl to do all his homework can be, but he knows enough to step out of the crystal meth lab and run from that trailer.

There comes a moment in the life of every bisexual boy-dyke when s/he cannot ignore the cock throbbing in hir fag fantasy. Mine came the first time I saw #33 on the tiny square of NBC’s streaming video. He spoke few words those first few episodes, and it seemed as if all he could do was take off a shirt or put it on, swig beer, run, hit and catch. And then he showed us he could fix gutters, cars, cable TV. Better than most men, I think. He’s the kind of guy who you want to save, an example of paternal abandonment grown into a boy-man-child-Michelangelo’s David.

While the other characters look too old for high school, Tim looks and acts too old for it. He is an adult, the kind of adult who picks bar fights and knows his glory days are behind him. He is the kind of man who conveys the burden of his being with a handshake, a nod of the head, and a simple “Thank You.”

I want Tim by my side at a girly bar, the wingman to inspire a thousand lap dances with one smirk of those plush red lips. I want to use his old button-down shirts as rags and shine his rifle from the back of his pickup truck. I want to put mascara on his pretty boy eyes and run my rugged hands along his polished cheeks. I want to watch the water ride the roller coaster of his abs while he is in the shower, his head tilted back, Adam’s Apple rippling in the steam, and those biceps popped as he strokes the grease from his locks, sheaves of bowed wheat in the fading sun. A toss of his head and a V-neck shirt, or a football uniform, or those sleeveless Underarmour shirts he wears, or… Forget it, a toss of his head, and I might even bottom for him, but only if he asked nice and called me “sir.” Then I’d lick those cowboy boots.

That’s my ode to you, big guy. I love you, Riggins.

Boners, anyone?