I fell in love with football on October 25th, 1986, in Boulder, Colorado. My dad and I were huddled around his little old radio, listening to the broadcast of Colorado v. Nebraska. Nebraska was a powerhouse of long-standing, a team with a long and rich football tradition, and were ranked #3 nationally coming into the game. Colorado? Well, the Buffaloes were struggling, to say the least. They carried a two-game winning streak into the game, but this was after having lost four in a row to start the season. The last time they'd beaten the Cornhuskers had been 14 years prior, a veritable eternity in college football terms. The only thing anyone was expecting that Saturday afternoon was for the Huskers to steamroll the Buffaloes into oblivion.
I didn't know any of this. I was an eight year-old kid, and football had only recently begun to penetrate my sphere of active concerns. But as we listened to the game, I could tell that something surprising and exciting was going on. Suddenly my dad looks up at me and says: "You want to go the game?" At the time, fans without tickets were allowed into the game for the last 10 minutes of the 4th quarter. I didn't know this either, but that wasn't what caught my attention. It was the spontaneity of the suggestion, the sound in my dad's voice and the look in his eye: something special was happening.
We hopped in the car and drove the twenty minutes or so it took us to get into Boulder, parked the car and hurried towards the stadium. The sense of excitement wasn't just ours, it was in the air, an atmospheric effect that got richer and stronger as we got closer and closer. By the time we arrived CU was carrying a 20-10 lead, and Folsom Field was seething with energy, getting ready to explode. They opened the gates at the 10 minute mark and we and everyone else who had also come to witness poured into the general admission section behind the north end zone.
The suddenness of being there was wonderfully overwhelming, so many things to take in all at once, and the quality of the energy, the sheer electricity, was something I'd never experienced in my young life up to that point. Nebraska had the ball, was driving towards our end of the field. It was with desperation, at that point the game was probably out of reach, but they were the mighty Cornhuskers and we were the 2-4 lowly Buffaloes, it was hard for anyone to believe in what was actually happening in front of them. And then Barry Remington stepped in front of Steve Taylor's passed and intercepted it at the Buff's 23 yard-line with 3:14 to go. I saw him, less than 40 yards away from me, and felt the simultaneous surge as 40,000 people erupted as a single entity. Bedlam. Ballgame over.
What I remember is the walk back to the car: perfect fall weather, sunny and gold in the late afternoon, the crispness and the chill in the air. And being happy, joyously and perfectly happy, without really knowing or understanding why; throwing my jacket into the air, running around in circles, just because I had to do something to celebrate, had to do something with my body that expressed this electric joy.
It was the inception of a love affair that has waxed and waned over the years since: I would discover new paramours, or become disenchanted with the rampant commercialism of the modern game and the single-mindedness of athletic pursuits. But I have returned, again and again, because it is a singular rarity in this life to find something which can synchronize the emotional lives of so many disparate individuals in the same moment, something which can take tens of thousands of strangers and turn them into a single, united voice. Yes, the incredible level of artifice of football, and the extent to which it's taken seriously; from a certain perspective this is all too silly and absurd. But if something offers the possibility of participating in a collective spirit of euphoria, heck yes I'll take it! And the fact of its artificiality, of its essential meaninglessness, is an inherent part of what makes it so damn wonderful.
Football!
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