Saturday, August 30, 2003
Hey hey hey! First Michigan football game!!
It was in-freaking-credible. You have no idea. You cannot have any idea. You think you have been to football games before, but you are mistaken. You have not been to a football game unless you have been to a University of Michigan game.
We won, of course, seeing as we were playing Central Michigan. They're not exactly a stellar team. It ended up being 45 to 7, I think... it might have been 48 or something.
The stadium is a sight which has to be seen to be believed. It is ridiculously huge. They announce the number of people at the game... there were 110,637 people at today's game. I mean, I can barely even conceive of that many people in one place. Swampscott has around 14,000 people living in it, and there's never any event which gets the entire town to turn out. Over one hundred and ten thousand people for a football game. Mass insanity.
i made this out of two separate pictures... and i still think i'm missing some of the stadium in the middle... you really can't get the full impression from these pictures, they're much too small to accurately convey it
Our marching band is huge. They're also really good. The halftime show had both bands (Michigan's and Central's) playing... Central did some kind of Disney movie tune medley, it made me think of Jessica. She would've loved it. Michigan did one hit wonders... at one point they were playing Hey Mickey, and everyone except for the drummers put down their instruments and started shaking their behinds. It was surreal. The one hit wonders business made me think of Kate, it was her sort of music.
Nearly perfect weather for the game... it was sunny and there was a cool breeze which blew sometimes. If it had been blowing all of the time, and if the sun hadn't been quite so powerful, it would've been nice. Alas, the sun was rather strong, and I fried. My neck is pretty red and my arms are burnt almost beyond recognition. Hoo ya, do they ever sting. Unfun.
At least my face didn't get burned... I had my Spinners visor. I love that thing. I think it confuses people, though, because I caught a lot of people staring at it. Or maybe it was the blue hair. I know not. Maybe a combination of the two.
Anywho, I made football buddies! The guy sitting next to me was nice, and he knew a good deal about football... we were exchanging professional remarks by the second quarter. Didn't catch his name or anything, but that's OK, I'll see him next gameday anyways.
I'm sitting really high up... row 92. I'm not sure how many rows there are, but I'm maybe 5 or 10 away from the very top. It's not bad though, I could see perfectly fine (surprisingly fine).
The walk from my dorm to the stadium is fun, because you walk past all the frats, and they're going nuts. It was 10 in the morning and people were already drunk. For some reason, one of the frats was blasting bagpipe music. I have no idea why this was so... I mean, they're Greek, right? Not Scottish. Unless I missed something vital here.
I got there really early, because I wasn't sure how long it was going to take me to walk from my dorm to the stadium, and I didn't know how long it would take to find my seat (a bit, as it happens... I went in the wrong way and had to walk halfway around the stadium). But I still got there about an hour before kickoff. So I got a drink (an obscenely expensive drink... like 3 bucks for a cup of Pepsi) and made my way up to my seat. There weren't a lot of people there yet, it being so early and all. No one I knew was in my section... I was in 28, everyone else I had spoken to was in either 29 or 30.
After a few minutes, in which I checked the digital camera to see how far the zoom would go, more people started trickling in. A girl sat down in the row in front of me. We started chatting, and she moved up to sit next to me. We ended up talking throughout the entire game. She was quite nice. Her name's Caroline, and she's in the LSandA but dorming on North Campus, for some unfathomable reason. We exchanged emails but even if we don't talk again soon we'll see each other at the next game. Football buddies are nice that way.
There was all sorts of insanity going on in the crowd during the game. There's an entire student section, which is like one whole corner of the stadium. You can tell where the student section ends because the students are the ones who make the really exaggerated gestures... when the band plays the fight song, you can see the edge of people who are punching their fists into the air and those who aren't.
There are, apparently, a lot of things that you do at the games. You scream on an increasing pitch and whirl your hat around during kickoffs, and you rattle your keys whenever the opposing team is on third down. If Michigan foils the other's team's attempt to make first down on a third down, the band plays a certain song and everyone makes a chopping motion with one arm.
I have no idea what this last is supposed to mean. It looks like the Tomahawk Chop that they do at Indians games, but it can't be. I mean, that wouldn't make any sense. I speculated about this with the guy sitting next to me.. both of us were equally perplexed. We resolved to try to find out before the next game.
We also got an intense wave going... then the student section started directing it. Like, a whole slew of people in the student section would start jabbing their thumbs downwards as the wave approached, and then the wave would go in slow motion. It was the craziest damn thing I've ever seen... if you've never seen over 110,000 people do the wave in slow motion, you're missing out. It looked like the entire world had been slowed down.
Then we got a cheer going where one half of the stadium would shout 'Go!', and then the other half would shout 'Blue!'. Again, if you've never heard 110,000 people shouting like this, you're missing out. It reverberates.
I do not understand how some people can come to the University of Michigan and not get season football tickets. It's just... wrong.
(note: The girls from my hall I went to Maize Craze with yesterday are Pam and Shelby. I think I forgot to mention their names in the last blog)
5:28 PM
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