This is the motto of today: Appalachian State is hot, hot, hot.
Today I walked into the Big House for the first football game of the season and told the people I was sitting with that I had decided to root for the opponent, a 1-AA team whose school I had only previously heard of because of an Internet viral video craze. My friends thought I was crazy, but I’m a sucker for the underdog and, unlike many in Ann Arbor, I definitely do not live and die by the Wolverines. Even so, when I made that statement, I never expected that I was going to be rooting for a winner.
Turns out, this was the first time a 1-AA team has beat a ranked D1 team ever.
I laughed a lot during the game at the tragedy of it all, and couldn’t help but feel a little glad for the Mountaineers as they stormed the field after the blocked field goal that ended the game (and almost resulted in another ASU touchdown). This is the sort of thing they make sports movies about… it’s just that I was sitting in the student section of the bigger, stronger, faster, and yet losing team. No one around me thought it was as amusing as I did.
I’ve never before seen a crowd leave a stadium in the shock that this one did. A freshman (I think) sitting near loudly declared that the remainder of his season tickets were for sale to anyone who would buy them. Another undergrad lamented that he should have sold his Ohio State ticket yesterday because now the going rate would surely plummet. Many, many people were heard on cell phones mourning with their loved ones about how “we” couldn’t ever get the 2-point conversion and how “we” couldn’t kick a field goal. Secretly, I was laughing then too, but I was a little afraid that someone would hurt me so I kept it to myself.