The Great Big Ten Commissioner has an atlas of all of the cities in his empire. “Sometimes,” the Commissioner says to Marco Polo, “it seems that it is easier for you to describe cities from this atlas than the ones you have actually been to.”
“For these cities, I just need a glimpse,” Marco Polo says. “I just need to see how the light looks when the sun sets over their jumbotron. To smell a single bratwurst wafting from a tailgate. To know how close I am to a Culvers. From there I will put together the perfect Big Ten city, one made from fragments, from the combination of space and time, from the collision between memory and plans for the future, from the people who have dwelled in a city from time immemorial and the people who will arrive and make it their home, buildings reassembled from ruins only to be razed again and cultures rising and collapsing the same way.
In this way, I can see infinite Big Ten cities. These elements already exist in some city in the world and they will be put into infinite combinations in cities that have existed or will exist somewhere on earth or within your Conference. Once you see their forms, you only need to be able to put them together in different ways to see cities that do not yet exist but yet already exist somewhere. The landscape of cities is flattened across time all being built, existing, and being destroyed simultaneously within the Big Ten into bigger tens, tens not even yet in your empire.”
The Great Commissioner paused and took a puff off his pipe. “How many of these infinite cities do you think we can get into the Playoff?” he said.
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