As one of the 6.5 people who read this blog, I suspect you also had elaborate plans to see the Gophers in the Rose Bowl.
There aren’t a lot of things you have the benefit of
planning for decades – retirement and maybe one’s death if you’re particularly
frisky in your morbidity – but Goldy and the crew were extremely generous in
giving us time to nail down every last detail. A Minnesota child born on January
1st, 1962, the last time the Gophers played in Pasadena, was ejected
out of the womb outfitted in a maroon and gold onesie and promised a lifetime
of college football glory. Second Rose Bowl in a row, national championship
winners the year before, the smug satisfaction that comes from cheering for a
perpetual winner was this their manifest destiny.
That child has been an AARP member for twelve years, just qualified
for social security, and is using the money they never had to spend on a Pasadena
trip to buy a winter condo on the Alabama coast. What a ride that must have
been: from expecting a national championship in childhood and adolescence, to
early adulthood in the penury that was Gopher football in the 80s and 90s, almost
reaching the mountaintop but falling to their metaphorical death at 41 in 2003,
convincing themselves Brew and Kill were the answers in their 50s, to hitting
60 and having college football pull the rug and make getting to the Rose Bowl a
near impossibility. Truly a life arc sponsored by Lexapro, ketamine, and
Headspace.
