Football season

So last weekend, having lived most of my life in a university town, I went to my first college football game. Sure, I'd heard the games from far off: the sudden swell of cheering like the roar of the sea, the anxious horns as fans tried to escape yet another dismal loss. I'd been to junior high and high school games, both as part of the pep squad and part of the laity. This was nothing like any of those: sheer scale of magnitude transformed it from a game into something verging on worship.

The stadium holds 72 000 people and most of the seats were filled. I don't think I'd ever seen that many people together in the same place, and all of them focused on the movement (or not) of a ball that from my seat in the nosebleed section was barely visible. I don't consider myself a rabid fan of football in general, but the groupthink crowd mentality was overwhelming: I was on my feet for two hours shouting my throat out for the home team among all the Greek girls and boys in their finery and the regular joes in their astounding variety of university-themed t-shirts.

We lost. Of course we did. We mostly lose, these days: our coach was brilliant for two years and has been flagging since. At least being the hosting team, it's not such a schlep to get home, and there's still the satisfaction of being part of a mass of losers, while the out-of-place fans in the other team's colors rejoice. We all went home grumbling about penalties, about passing games, about the coach, about this and that, as if any of us could have turned the game around.

In the morning, it all seemed vaguely surreal. I think it's a trick of the lights: everything in the bowl of the stadium seems hyper-real, ultra-detailed, each replay shown in full color on the immense screen that distracted drivers for months before they finished the construction of the lower wall. The cameras that captured footage of the game were powerful enough to show us craters on the moon during halftime. The smell of fried food and diesel fumes in the air. Time got skewed by the gravity of the game. The day faded into sunset, but it was noon-bright until we left the stadium and crept back to our car, where the twelve-minute drive home took three quarters of an hour, the cars bumper to bumper along the narrow little streets. How could anything else be as true as the muscled young men on the gridiron with the eyes and thoughts of half the state's population on them, and the voices of the seventy-two thousand of us there raised in chorus? But then, it was nothing like my regular life, so how could the game have been anything but a vivid dream?

Hard to say. Either way, I'd do it again.