Today I finished my weekly quiz (this week's topics were biochemistry and anatomy) around noon and discovered that a fellow student was selling a single ticket to the afternoon season-opening football game at Michigan stadium against Connecticut. I wanted to get to at least one game this season and decided that no game was better than the first game. So I arranged to buy the ticket for $30, then headed to a store on State Street to pick up a t-shirt--I didn't want to be caught in the Big House without spiritwear, and I certainly didn't want to be mistaken for a UConn fan (of which I think I saw two the entire afternoon). I bought a yellow shirt with a straight "Michigan" logo so I could wear it to other sporting events. Then I coasted down the hill on my bike, past thousands of students playing dance music and drinking outside of frat houses, and relished the big-midwest-school-pregame-experience. I thought the partying we witnessed in Barcelona before the Madrid-Seville championship match was the most excessive I would ever witness, but the pregame celebrations I witnessed today may equal or surpass those of the European fans. For one thing, tailgates started around 7 am this morning for a 3:30 pm game (In Barcelona we witnessed dance parties at noon for a 9 pm game). In Barcelona there were two main fan zones for each team, relatively well contained by fences like a nice benign tumor. But in Ann Arbor the parties had metastasized, with many small and medium sized gatherings and tailgating over several square miles around the stadium.
I navigated through the throngs, parked my bike at the outdoor track, and joined the herd moving to the stadium gates. Everyone was decked in maize and blue, and there was palpable excitement for the first game of the season. It was partly sunny at that point, not too chilly, and I watched overhead as a plane drew an "M" in the sky with its exhaust; there were also a couple helicopters flying around the stadium at lower altitude. Unfortunately, when I got to the gate I was told that for a student ticket I needed a student ID, which I did not have on me, so had to squeeze through the crowds to a ticket office, wait in line for twenty minutes, and pay another $30 to get my ticket "validated" (i.e. make up the difference to a non-student ticket). As I was waiting in line some fighter jets did a flyover of the stadium. I made it into the stadium just after kickoff, went to section 29, and showed the usher my ticket. "Way down there," he told me and pushed me rather hard down the stairs. My ticket, it turns out, was from a med student who also went to Michigan for undergrad, so she had some pretty amazing seats. The stairway was packed with people and it quickly became obvious that there were way more people at the lower levels than who actually had tickets to be there. The row with my seat, like all the other rows, was completely full of students standing sideways on the bleachers. There was no way I was going to fit too, so I stood around on the stairs for awhile until a security officer told us to move out of the stairs and I sheepishly slid myself in between two screaming students. There I stood for the first half, both feet only half on the bleacher, back twisted, neck craned, watching Michigan score two touchdowns in the first quarter and nothing for Connecticut. I heard "The Victors" fight song, the lyrics of which are plastered all over med school posters, and some other cheers with arm chopping and key shaking. Connecticut scored a touchdown and a field goal in the second quarter, but Michigan also scored another touchdown. At halftime I was expecting everyone to leave to get a hotdog or something, but instead I was surprised that as the clock ran down everyone suddenly sat down on the bleachers around me. Before I knew it, I was trapped, surrounded by a sea of knees. There was no escape--so I just watched the marching band perform. They were good but not loud enough. Finally the third quarter began and I decided to exit the student section and explore the rest of the stadium.
I did a full loop, smelled the fried dough and caramel corn, and sat down in a non-student section on the opposite side of the field. There I watched as Michigan continued to demolish UConn (they won 30-10). The stadium really didn't look that big because it wasn't super high, but in the fourth quarter it was announced that the attendance was 113,090, an NCAA record for the best-attended college football game ever in America! That got the crowd really excited. The student section did some more cool cheers; for example they split into two groups and yelled "Go" and "Blue" back and forth for a minute. They also started a wave. Many fans started leaving in the fourth quarter, but all the students stayed to the very end. Finally the game was over and it was a reverse pilgrimage back into town, with many stopping at bars and restaurants. What a game and ritual!
