Wednesday, October 16, 2024

The Friends We Made Along the Way

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.

I wonder how their Pasadena plans changed over their life. For me, the team was such cheeks when I was growing up that the idea we’d have any shot at the Rose Bowl really didn’t occur to me until the 1999 season. I absolutely would have gone if we’d have won the conference prior to that (I’m certain I’d still be paying off the credit card debt, but that was a problem for Future Frothy to address), but it was left in the part of my brain that thought it would have been cool to soar across the sky like a majestic eagle or walk barefoot on the sun. After the 1999 season, winning the conference and heading to Pasadena entered the realm of the possible. After the 2003 season, it became an obsession.

To the extent one can have a relationship with a sporting event, my relationship with the Rose Bowl was what the kids might call toxic. I did the bad thing where you take something tangible – a football game – and turn it into a concept. In the abstract, that’s totally fine: making something more than what it is gives us rivalry games, exciting riots outside of soccer stadia, money, and countries. It is a lot less totally fine when you let that concept turn into, like, a life objective, where you will die alone, sweaty, and unfulfilled if it is not achieved. And it turns out, no matter how hard I wished, how aggressively I hit at the haters on Twitter, or how many sit-ups I did (I didn’t do many sit-ups and am now certain this is why we never won the B1G), the Gophers making the Rose Bowl was not something I had any control over. Zero. None. I may as well have let the fulfillment of my life be dictated by the windsock at the local airport.

So, hell yeah I had a plan for when the Gophers made it. I was going to fly into Vegas with a friend or two a few days after Christmas, win enormous amounts of money playing craps, rent an Aston Martin, drive to LA at 130mph, get an aggravated reckless driving and spend a night in jail, cover up my ankle monitor to watch the Rose Bowl parade, and soak in the culmination of my hard work with 50,000 of my best friends all in maroon and gold as the Gophers took the field with the sun setting on the San Gabriel mountains. If I’d have died right then, I would have been sweaty, but not alone and definitely not unfulfilled.

But, yeah, you know, we never made it. When the regular season game at UCLA was announced last year, I really wasn’t sure what to do. I’d put the Rose Bowl in that compartment of things I never got to achieve – test pilot, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, giraffe – where there was whiff of bittersweetness, but you’re mostly over it. How would I feel, though, going to that hallowed ground under different circumstances? No parade, no 100,000 people, no blimp, no ankle monitor? I was going, then I wasn’t going, then Indiana crushed UCLA and I was in under the rationale that UCLA was terrible and it would be fun to watch us win a road game. Plus, most of my Gopher friends were going and it’d be good to hang with them regardless of the outcome or other circumstances.

So, I went. It was complicated walking down into the valley where the Rose Bowl sits, seeing the iconic signage on the front of the stadium, watching the sun set on the mountains. But it was also shockingly not special. Drinking beers in the tailgate lots, being frustrated with offensive line play, watching Perich destroy entire civilizations of innocents.

It was just a normal game at the Rose Bowl with probably 15,000 of my best friends all in maroon and gold. Maybe the real Rose Bowl was all those friends we made along the way.

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