Looking In

Last weekend, I peeked in on my alma mater's football game against Pac-Ten machine Stanford. The University of Colorado was having its buffalo hat handed to them by the Cardinal. It wasn't pretty. The game, that is. The day itself looked to be another glorious one at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It's hard to imagine that, given the choice of all manner of things to do in the Centennial State with all its great outdoors beckoning on yet another day of glorious sunshine, anyone would be silly enough to be trapped inside what was once a horseshoe and not a full bowl of fans looking for a win. Just one. Big time college football kind of came and went in Boulder, Colorado some time ago. I know because I was there.
I was one of those fools who, along with my mother, would sit in the stands and watch every down, every play, every near miss. And once upon a long time ago, I was rewarded with a chance to see my team, or at least the one for whom I helped pay tuition, play for a national championship. This was back in the days before there were computers to decide such things, and even before some genius came up with the idea to seed teams in a playoff system. This was back when things were settled the old fashioned way: arguing.
This came the year after the somewhat miraculous and stirring season when CU's quarterback knocked up the coach's daughter and then got cancer and we all waited to see the storybook ending, but were turned away at the last minute by the luck of the Irish. Notre Dame finished off any hope of making a TV movie about that oddly serendipitous season by winning the Orange Bowl. Sitting there in that relic of a stadium, I thought about what it took to get there, and how I imagined it would be another hundred years or so before something like that would happen again.
As it turned out, I needn't have panicked. The Golden Buffs pounded their way through the next year's schedule, landing themselves once again at the foot of college football immortality. Against the Fighting Irish. Revenge. Or retribution? Hard to say, but this year I didn't have the option of flying down to south Florida to take it all in personally. I watched on TV. My mother's TV. After sitting through all those years of miserable football, we were delivered a last minute win and a chance to be the subject of a great many years of fuss and strife. So what if it took five downs to beat Missouri for the chance at an undefeated season? That's what it took. We didn't make the rules. We just benefited from their lackadaisical application.
So, now that I live just up the road from the Stanford stadium, and down the street from where the Cal Bears play, I find myself on autumn Saturday afternoons drifting back to those sunny days I spent parked on those bleachers, hoping for something that might never come.
It did. And then I moved on. But I still like to take a look every now and then, just to remember what kind of choices I am capable of making.