Humble Pie

Warning: Football Post Ahead. (Also, please watch your step for the overused parenthetical.)

If ever there was one, this was a week to get your hands on often-elusive Notre Dame tickets.

I heard of someone who bought two legitimate tickets for $20. One university employee who receives from their dean two tickets to some game in the season received five. Instead of the familiar scene of fans with hands raised, fingers showing the number they wanted, there were countless individuals with their tickets waving to anyone interested. One fan, looking for a singular ticket, had his hand up for all of one minute before he found one.

In our department, countless faculty were trying to find takers, and the ticket office had at least thirty alumni return their tickets through express mail on Friday. After the ticket office refused to accept any more tickets due to the number they already had on hand (seriously, that never happens), a coworker offered me both of hers for free. She was going on vacation and didn't want them to go to waste.

The weather outlook was beautiful, so Eric and I walked to campus. It was eerily quiet on our way and I felt as if I were in a Twilight Zone episode. The streets weren't all blocked off like normal, and the crowds were missing from their regular haunts. Once inside the stadium, the eeriness wore off, as it was still a full house as far as I could tell.

It was a good game. There were frustrating times (Sharpley's fumble that was returned for the touchdown that finally put Navy in the lead), but we made Navy earn the end to their losing streak.


In triple overtime, Navy finally bested us. If it wasn't for the pass interference, I think we would have headed to quadruple overtime. As it was, we couldn't perform the two-point conversion from 1.5 yards, and above you see our final play. (You can also tell our vantage point. Pretty good seats for the first and third overtime, especially.)

We're nursing our wounds, trying not to dwell on the sorry losing streak we find ourselves in, and I'm trying to keep Eric from focusing on when we could have earned points in the game that would have kept us from being tied at the end of regulation (namely, at 4th and 15, faking a field-goal attempt to try and run for the first down; no surprise, we turned it over on downs).

There now. Maybe I have this out of my system. I might even be able to make it to the end of the season without another blog reference. (As an aside, I really enjoy how I can find myself in a nitty-gritty football conversation at work with half a dozen other women -- only in South Bend.)