A great memory from the past

With football season finally getting ready to start, I figured I'd share a picture and memory of a great trip my buddy and I took. First I've only been to 2 OSU v t.u.n. (team up north) games in person. The first was "the slip" where Shawn Springs had improper cleats on and let one play ruin a shot at a national championship, an all to common experience in the Cooper years. Now let me say that time, winning, and a little perspective have allowed me to appreciate the good things coop brought to Columbus: a rose bowl victory, competing year in year out nationally for the best recruiting class, and doing so in a classy manor. Unfortunately the pain of 2-10-1 will always be the first thought when coop is mentioned, but his time at OSU was important and set up a good program so coach Tressel could come in and take that talent to the next level. Now on to my second trip....... My friend Munish says to me lets go to Ann arbor and see 'the game' at their place in early fall of 2005 and I was hesitant to say the least. If you have read my other stuff you can see I'm a bit superstitious and was not sure if I'd be a jinx seeing the game in person. He convinced me that it was a once in a life time chance and that Tressel was 3-1 vs Michigan, things are different now. Now we didn't have a ticket hook up, wanted good seats, but didn't have deep pockets. Looking at tickets on ebay, it was clear that we could get way better seats if we bought single tickets in sections close to each other and went that way, so he got a ticket for a little over face value just above the student section and I got one in same section, but down about 15 rows in the heart of the student section. You may think I'm crazy, and I am, but I would consider it a great honor to die fighting for the buckeyes in the student section. It wasn't till the 3rd quarter of the game that it occurred to me "what would I do if we lost and I was stuck around all these people?" OK, I'm stupid, but you'll see someone was looking out for me that day. The buckeyes pulled out a great victory capped by a Antonio Pittman TD run after future Heisman trophy winner (and Michigan game stud 3-0 with sick numbers as a starter) Troy Smith led a great drive! I still remember the long faces and the overwhelming personal disbelief at what I had just seen. We O-H I-O'd all the way back to the car. We were sitting in traffic listening to the local fans call the local sports radio station and bitch about the game and I just started pounding on my steering wheel like a mad man saying "I can't F-ing believe we won, I can't believe it!!" I think Munish was as scared as happy, probably thinking why did I let him drive he's more nuts than I thought.

Now here is the kicker, we waited forever (not good layout at bighouse for crowd control) for crowds to clear out to get to where we could talk to each other about the game and take some pictures, plus we wanted to sing Carmen Ohio with the team and soak it all in!! So we were looking for someone to take a picture of us, but the only people still close to us were an older couple whom were Michigan fans. The guy was turned around talking to the other Michigan fan still around, so we asked the lady to take our picture and she kindly obliged. (I will take a second here to bash buckeye fans, Michigan fans are way more classy and even tempered than we are and showed great sportsmanship, of course that was before they knew they were upon a cooper like era) Anyway, right as she took the picture her husband turned around to see what we were doing and yell what are you doing to her as she snapped this sweeeet picture!! 4-1 baby!!!