Through these gates pass the greatest fans in college foot-ball. The audacity. The bias.
The nerve. Rarely will you find me defending the merit of religion, but I'm as contrarian as Jesus was devout. Also, I was drunk at midnight following yet another Husker loss.
In the basement bar, behind a stack of camouflage Busch Light cans my buddy slurred his point of view, "I can't get behind the idea that just because who your parents are, and where you grew up, that a person can spend so much time in church believing their God is better than others" he said. I lifted my Makers Mark in the air, like a pastor raising his hand to their congregation, and replied to my buddy, "And yet you are a loyal Nebraska football fan." Thankfully the basement crowd was sober enough to recognize the irony and thus the joke.
We laughed, including my friend, and went back to watching a meaningless Pac-12 football game we'd bet on before betting became cool, legal and rogue. People are also reading..
. The following Friday I dropped my 3-year-old daughter off at Little Kingdom off Old Cheney Road; I was reminded of that drunken conversation. The turtle room for toddlers was its own version of a Sea of Red.
Little girls in cheerleading outfits, scarlet bows and white pom-poms; little boys sporting Burkhead and Armstrong jerseys with eye black and white Adidas socks pulled high. Red shirts engulfed every unassuming toddler's tiny body. Each of them too young to know about the game of the century, the fumb.