NASHVILLE, Tenn.— I really need to get started on this column, but right now I am hopelessly lost in possibly the world’s largest parking lot, somewhere outside what is surely the world’s biggest and most confusing maze disguised as a mega resort hotel.

I’m headed back to my more modest accommodations — if, in fact, I ever get back downtown.

Right now, it’s not looking promising. There are millions of cars out here and all of them look just like my rental compact. Yeah, I know. Just press the emergency flasher button.

Apparently I haven’t gotten close enough, certainly not warm enough, for that trick to work.

Oh, did I mention that I’m wandering around blindly in the rain, fairly well drenched and shivering in a classic battle with the cold and flu season?

So you’re just going to have to bear with me, OK. I know the blasted car is around here somewhere.

But it could take a while, and if I ever do find it, it’s going to cost me the going rate, $21 plus tax, to get it out of the parking lot.

So hang loose for a while.

….

OK, I’m back (it’s been several hours). Neither rain, nor sleet nor dark of night …

But maybe this is why you always strive for one of those Florida bowls.

LSU arrived here Saturday for the Music City Bowl, fleeing a rainy day in Baton Rouge for … an absolutely miserable day in the Music City.

I’ve been here about seven hours now and the steady rain hasn’t let up yet, with temps down in the 40s and the chagrin of the Chamber of Commerce at near-record highs.

What Les Miles would call a “good, stiff dew,” only much chillier.

Of course, LSU’s last two holiday visits down to the Sunshine State were hardly balmy. The Tigers played on a swamp in a driving rain at the Capitol One Bowl in Orlando and, though the run-up to last year’s Outback Bowl in Tampa was beach-worthy, game day pulled a fast one and dawned damp, drizzly and unseasonably cool, stubbornly remaining that way throughout LSU’s sloppy victory over Iowa.

So, there are no guarantees with the holiday season when it comes bowling.

But, though LSU makes occasional visits here to play Vanderbilt, that’s at another stadium. Tuesday’s game will be at LP Field down hard by the Cumberland River, where the NFL Tennessee Titans and Zach Mettenberger play.

From the outside, it looks like an elaborate post-Christmas father-son Lego project.

So at least it will be something different for an LSU bowl when the Tigers tangle with Notre Dame on Tuesday.

The locals are excited about it.

“We’ve never had two big-time teams like LSU and Notre Dame for our little bowl,” the guy at the check-in desk told me.

Perhaps due to the brand-name opponent, even spoiled LSU fans seem to be paying attention to what is otherwise an off-Broadway engagement for them. And Nashville, in fact, has a Broadway, just a stone’s throw from the stadium, an entertainment zone where any odd waiter from Waffle House will flat embarrass you at karaoke.

LSU sold “all but a handful” of its tickets after having real trouble giving any away to Tampa last year.

So, there’s that.

But back to the Gaylord Opryland resort, which is a “hotel” in the same sense that the USS Nimitz is a “boat.”

It is LSU’s headquarters for the visit, and also Notre Dame’s, which sounds delightfully dangerous on the surface.

Teams at the Sugar Bowl, for instance, seem to always be bumping into each other during scouting missions to the French Quarter, with predictable testosterone in play.

And they’re going to stick these two teams in the very same hotel for multiple days?

But this looks pretty safe.

If the Tigers and Irish ever bump into each other in the coming days, it will be strictly by accident.

More likely, one or the other will be lost rather than looking for mischief.

Though technically both are under one roof, LSU is housed in the Delta Wing, while Notre Dame is over there in the Magnolia Wing, both roughly the size of the Pentagon.

By my quick count, that means they are separated by three atriums, four porticos, a convention center, a half-dozen stone fences, a garden canopy and at least two indoor rivers, one of which offers boat rides for a tidy fee.

Curfew is always a concern for bowl games, with the media doing a standard head count in pregame warmups to see who might be missing for the ever-popular violation of team rules.

Forget that this year.

The biggest fear for both coaches has to be taking the field Tuesday at half-strength, with the other half still wandering desperately somewhere between the Cascades Canopy and Delta Island, too proud to ask directions and finding the property map that every guest is issued fairly confusing at best, deceiving at worst.

OK, yes — you guessed it — I had a little trouble finding the location for LSU’s grand entrance at the “Delta Portico,” which apparently is never to be confused with the “Delta Ramp,” no matter how many false pathways and twisting inlets one takes during the search.

This, mind you, in an indoor space the size of Vermont where, best I could tell, every man, woman and child in the state of Tennessee spends the days between Christmas and the New Year.

The big event Saturday was some sort of national “cheer” competition, which looked to feature every known high school in the United States and most of its NATO allies.

But, through sheer diligence and some blind luck, danged if I didn’t stumble onto LSU’s entrance just as Les Miles got off the bus, just as a press conference was hastily arranged in the midst of thousands who happened to be in this particular atrium.

The handful of LSU fans yelled encouragement, the vast majority — maybe in for the cheer competition —just started yelling for the sheer heck of it, perhaps to avoid being drowned out by fake indoor waterfalls.

So, though standing right next to Miles, I couldn’t understand a word he said, which really isn’t unusual under ideal circumstances.

“What’d he’d say?” I asked a sportswriter buddy with a better earshot.

“He said, ‘The tale of the game will be what you see,’ ” he answered.

“What’s that mean?”

The buddy shrugged his shoulders.

Who knows?

But somehow it all felt like home again.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU sports. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com(MGNonline)