On Heartbreak

Go to a big sports school, they said. It'll be so much fun.

You, as a human being, are irrational and stupid and search for meaning in irrational and stupid things. 

College football is weird and stupid and very extra. Thus the happiness of you, and millions of others, naturally depends on the athletic pursuits of these 18-23 year-olds that are largely unpaid.

Because of this contagious and crazy fandom, college football is the closest thing you’ve ever seen to a true religious experience. 

But it’s not your fault. When you were younger, you spent a lot of Saturday nights alone. Your older brothers were hanging out with high school friends, and your mom would take a well-earned night off from raising the three of you so she could go enjoy a dinner or movie with her friends. 

Before she’d leave, she’d hand you a $20 bill, tell you to order a pizza, and say she’d be home by 9pm. 

You’d take that $20 and order the Dominos 5-5-5 deal (which to this day you have no idea how they ever made money on). You’d sit on the couch, fire up the tv, and throw on ESPN or FOX or ABC and spend the hours from roughly 4-9pm PST glued to the screen, munching your pepperoni pizza, enjoying the best college football games of the day. During commercial breaks, you’d switch over to the Disney Channel original movie playing that night since you were an angsty pre-teen and those movies slapped. 

Those hours, spent more often than not alone, were where you fell in love with college football (and Hillary Duff). The Bay Area teams you could’ve rooted for typically sucked. Going to watch Cal play was boring and took four hours (not including the hour car ride) and the benches were uncomfortable and half the stadium was empty anyway. 

Why would you watch what was basically a glorified high school game when you could watch the pageantry and absolute mania of an SEC or BIG Ten game?

Flash forward a few years, and you head to Ann Arbor to experience college football in its true glory. The Big Ten. The Big House. The program with the most wins in college football history. 

“You gotta go to a big sports school,” everyone said. “It’ll be so fun having a major college team to root for.”

And it is. Your first five weeks as a Michigan sports fan are incredible. Michigan starts 5-0. Denard Robinson is a Heisman favorite. Your first gameday is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced — the entire city shuts down, maize-and-blue overflows the streets, and when you walk into the Big House and see 110,000 people for the first time in your life, 18-year-old you is teary eyed and awestruck. 

But then in Game 6 of that year Michigan plays Michigan State. 

Michigan gets the breaks beaten off of ‘em, lose six of their last eight games, and then the Michigan winter — your first — kicks in. 

But that’s okay. The next year there’s a new coach — a Michigan Man — and again The Team starts off with a nice undefeated streak, this time winning the first six games of the season. 

And then they play Michigan State.

And State beats the breaks off of ‘em.  

This trend is by no means universal. Michigan beats MSU a number of times over the ensuing years, but the losses to them are always somehow outsized. You don’t need to see a video replay of the botched punt from 2015. Nor do you need a reminder of last year’s loss, during Covid, that ended any hope of a meaningful season when many could’ve used it.

But this year — this year was going to be different. Not because you were going to beat Michigan State, but because your expectations were so diminished for this team after going 2-4 last year that you promised, no matter what happened, you weren’t going to get your hopes up only to get them dashed again. 

Your older now, almost 30. Wise. You know better than to fantasize about a magical season that would make all the pain over the past decade worth it. 

Then, of course, Michigan starts 7-0. And somehow, despite that little voice in the back of your head tripping every alarm it possibly can, you find yourself purchasing a plane ticket to Detroit, and a ticket for the MSU game. 

“Have you learned absolutely nothing?” That voice in your head asks. To which you reply, not with an answer, but, since it’s 2021, with a meme:

So you head to Spartan Stadium for your first road game in this rivalry. And you know what? Michigan State doesn’t beat the brakes off of you. In fact, for the first forty minutes of the game you’re the better team.

You and your friend are the happiest people in a sea of Green and White. You’re hitting each other after every touchdown pass, screaming as Aidan Hutchison draws hold after hold. The refs screw up a fumble recovery touchdown but it doesn’t matter because you’re up 16 points (16!) halfway through the third quarter.

But then an emptiness forms in the pit of your stomach. At first you think it’s just your buzz wearing off, but no. It’s something you’ve experienced before, sure, but not that.

And then that pit in your stomach is accompanied by the little voice in the back of your head. You try and shake it off.

Fuck off. We’re up sixteen!

This year is different. You have a legitimate lead, an all-world defense, and you’re getting great quarterback play which never happens on the road against a top-10 team...

You could win this game. You should win this game. 

And that’s when the voice in your head gets a bit louder because when you should win a game, that’s almost invariably when Michigan finds a way to lose it.

The next quarter-and-a-half cannot be described as a train wreck, because no one cheers for train wrecks. Unfortunately for you, in Spartan Stadium there are about 75,000 people rooting very hard for Michigan’s utter collapse, which means that as Sparty launches their comeback you and your buddy are now one of the few silent people in the stands. 

Watching your team have a meltdown in a hostile environment is like watching your mortal enemy receive a promotion you’d been hoping for. You’re frazzled. You can’t do anything but stand there and shut your mouth.

But it’s worse than that because everyone around you is clapping and slapping each other’s backs and having a right jovial time. The decibels become deafening as the impossible comeback turns to improbable, then to a tie game, then to a holy-shit-they-have-the-fucking-lead. It’s utter mayhem.

Then you realize that the kids on the field — those 18-23 year olds representing Michigan — have rarely if ever experienced a frenzied atmosphere akin to a revolution. And then this spiral leads you down to a place where you wonder if your team is ever going to get another first down. And then the freshman QB (who you really like and genuinely feel terrible for) fumbles the ball and then MSU’s running back has scored his fifth touchdown and then the refs fuck up yet another call and then your typically reliable quarterback throws an interception and then...

Before you know it, you and your friend are shaking hands with the MSU fans next to you who have been good-natured enough not to rub it in. You walk out as Sparty goes into victory formation. 

Insults and middle fingers are thrown your way out of the stadium. You try to navigate the path through this foreign campus to your car a few miles away, and a few MSU college kids start talking shit to you and all you can do is ignore them and keep walking. You hear about a couch getting burned. A car getting tipped over. You and your friend say nothing, other than the occasional, exasperated, “fuck.”

On that lonely, dreary walk you start to negotiate with yourself. It’s just a game, you say. You don’t get hurt by losses nearly as much as you used to, since you’re more used to it now.

That whole older, wiser thing.

But that doesn’t really make you feel better because you know it’s a lie. That you’re definitely older but not necessarily wiser actually makes you actually feel a bit worse. 

When you get back to the car your friend doesn’t immediately put the key in the ignition. He sits there, kind of dumbfounded, as are you. But your brain has been working for the past fifteen minutes, so you ask your friend: “Are you ready to hear how I can spin this so it’s not so bad?”

And he nods, and you begin discussing three-way ties for the division and how if — if — you somehow manage to win out and beat Ohio State you have a shot at the Big Ten title…assuming, of course, that a couple other things break your way. Then your friend starts the car and there’s more silence as you try to think up other ways in which maybe this loss isn’t so bad.

While he navigates through the traffic and general drunken merriment, you remember a few minutes prior to the two MSU fans walking ahead of you. A father and son. 

It was close to your car, the brunt of the drunken merriment a good mile away. It was almost quiet as the son jogged to catch up with his dad. “I think I left my Mountain Dew in the stadium.”

The dad turned to him. “Oh, how much did you drink — about half of it?”

“Yeah about half.”

“Ah.”

“It’s okay,” the son says. “I think I have a water in the car.”

And you think to yourself, as you’re driving east on Highway 96, the orange and yellow and red leaves flying past: How perfectly Midwest was that exchange? 

Then you spend the rest of the drive trying to find some deeper meaning in it, too.