Crushed Roses (My Football Commentary For The Year)

Well, crap. And up until the last eight or so minutes of the game, you could believe that this time, it was going to happen. But now for the team, it's off to the Holiday Bowl; for the legions of Old Blues out there, it's another year (or forty-eight) of waiting for a Rose Bowl to come around.

At least this saves Shelby from having to listen to me whistle Cal fight songs until January 1st. And maybe by the time Berkeley finally does make it back into the Rose Bowl, I'll have had the time to build up the equity position that'll be necessary to purchase a pair of tickets — decades of pent-up demand aren't going to be pretty.

And with Stanford's record this season, we can be damn certain that our team is going to win the Big Game this year. Go Bears! Beat Stanford!

(Bicycle racing and Cal football are the two sports that I half-heartedly follow. Despite being a geek, I had season football tickets for all four years that I was at Berkeley. The idea of being 'loyal' to a professional football or baseball team confuses me, because they're certainly not going to be loyal to you, at least not in the modern era. Pro sports' only reason for being is to turn you and your city upside down and shake out all of the money that they can — and when the pennies stop falling [or stop falling fast enough], they'll leave you in a heartbeat to chase a different city or demographic [witness the 49ers or the 'Los Angeles' Angels]. But with a college team, your 'tribe' actually does have something all in common, you know the team's never going anywhere else, the players are exalted but not multi-million-earning superhumans, and the tickets are [mostly] cheap. There's a connection there with me that the NFL is never going to make. I've had "Go Bears!" moments in Europe, in airplanes, and in the mountains of New Mexico.)