Go, Monkey. Go.

Michael Kruse: He's fast, he's strong, he's smart. He's uncaged and to this point he's uncatchable. The monkey on the loose around the Tampa Bay area for the last year and a half is a young adult male rhesus macaque. He's been everywhere from East Tampa to Temple Terrace, Oldsmar to Gulfport, Clearwater to south St. Petersburg, backed by Twitter chatter, late-night TV talk, tens of thousands of fans on Facebook and a catchy community-wide battle cry:

"Go, monkey, go!"

Raves the rooting public: I want to be free like the monkey. I want to trade lives with the monkey. I want to be the monkey. Enough with the rat race. Give me the monkey race!

But "Go, monkey, go!" is our cheer. It's not like that for the monkey. The monkey doesn't run because he wants to. The monkey runs because millions of years of evolution tell him to. He's not running from something — he's running toward something.