There's a void in our lives right now. An aching chasm of inconsolable emptiness. Le Tour is over for another year.

After three weeks of daily exposure, we had just started to accept the joy of televised cycling as a part of daily life, and voila, it's gone. Like the first weekend after the NFL season ends (not counting the unwatchable Pro Bowl), there is an emptiness. Where once the goofy honk of European car horns, the shouts of the crazed, orange-shirted Basque fans, and the voices of Phil and Paul filled the house, now there is just the melancholy ticking of a clock somewhere in a darkened room.

Well, it might not be that bad, but we're already asking, when's the Vuelta start?

The closest we're going to come to seeing cycling on TV for a while.

The 2006 Tour, the first of the post-Lance era, was great. Floyd Landis capped a dream year and overcame a completely degenerated hip to win it all with one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the Tour. Of course, there was a down side for Floyd.

Oscar Pereiro, Carlos Sastre, and Andreas Kloden also had impressive Tours. And with many veteran stars missing from the peloton this year, the future of the Tour was more clearly visible. Standout performances by young riders like Cyril Dessell, Marcus Fothen, Frank Schleck, and Damiano Cunego promise great Tours for years to come.

Part of what makes the Tour so special is the underexposure factor. In the same way that periodic events like the Olympics, World Cup, and America's Cup focus attention on sports that Americans don't usually care about, the Tour on OLN is about the only prolonged exposure Americans ever get to professional road racing. For three weeks every July we can look forward to hours of cycling every day. That's a rare treat indeed for US cycling fans.

And it's more than just the physical sport that makes it so entertaining. It's the beauty and pain and excitement and disappointment of a three-week ultraendurance event. It's the drama of human suffering and endurance, strategy, teamwork, and psychology.

OLN's coverage of the Tour is also a lot like televised baseball. It's great to see the action, but it's also very comforting just knowing it's there for you in the background, for hours, every day. It's a companion, it's a lover, it's a bitch, it's a friend. Hold on, we're getting a bit choked up here. A moment . . .

As we wait for next July to roll around again, we're holding our breath that the ever-accelerating corporatization of OLN -- soon to reborn as vs. -- won't result in more bells and whistles and less televised cycling. There's a big difference between cycling coverage and televised cycling.

We shall see. In the meantime, we only have to suffer through another two weeks of inconsolable emptiness -- NFL training camps start this week.