Black and gold

There is nothing like a football weekend.

We live on the other side of the river from campus, so the flurry of activity that corresponds with a football weekend really touches us only tangentially. Unless, that is, we venture across the Wabash into West Lafayette. Which we do by choice, as we have season tickets.

But entering a maelstrom of chaos by choice makes it fun, rather than a hassle.

And truth be told, I love a football weekend. I love the crowds, the sights, the smells. I love to walk past the tailgating fans, to enter a stadium filled with cheering fans, all in black and gold. I love to listen to the band, yell with the crowd, watch the plays. It's even better when your team wins. The Boilers were way ahead in the first few minutes of the game. Yet they couldn't hold onto their victory. It slipped away, through two overtimes. The Oregon Ducks won by six points.

It's funny, sort of surreal, if you think about it, to watch grown men and women shouting, "One, two, three, four, first down," complete with hand motions, along with a man dressed as Purdue Pete. We exchange high fives with everyone around us when there's a good play. We analyze each move with our new best friends who sit next to us.

All in the name of football.

We avoid the hassles of parking by riding the free trolley to the game. The trolley runs between downtown Lafayette and the Purdue campus, and we are a just a few short blocks from downtown. We get a nice little tour of campus as we ride, going past the dorms on the edge of campus, the vet school, the basketball arena.

And inexplicably, on Saturday I was possessed by a sudden and overpowering yearning for my college days back at Mizzou.

I have never felt that longing before, that intense sensation. I've always harbored fond memories of my days at the University of Missouri. When friends would talk about how much fun college was, I would agree, but I've felt content that those days were past. But not on Saturday. I was filled with an intense longing for Faurot Field, for football Saturdays when we all trooped over to the stadium en masse, when the entire campus was possessed with Tiger mania. One year my dorm had seats right behind Marching Mizzou, so we spent the whole game "in" on all their antics.

After the game, it was all about partying or hanging out with friends, either celebrating a victory or lamenting a loss - in my case, usually the latter, as the old Tigers were not playing their best in the years I was at Mizzou.

I'm sure my memories are vague and cloudy; I'm viewing many, many football Saturdays inextricably intertwined in the hazy recesses of my mind. They are important years, the college ones, years in which my sense of self was defined.

I want my daughter to have that same experience. I want her to go to a school where she can become involved and turn into the adult she is meant to be.

I am also making plans to get back to Missouri for a game. It won't be this year, but next year we will be up for it. We will have morphed into those alumni we, students, ignored, that we found desperado-ish.

Not that it matters. Those kids will look back in 20 years just as I do, with a great affection and fond memories. They will return to college games as an adult and remember their youth. They will smile, as I do, at what has transpired in the intervening years. And they will know that these are the moments that make up our lives.