Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Logo of The Middlebury Campus
Tuesday, Apr 23, 2024
Sports

Dawg Days

I am a die-hard Boston sports fan. For example, in 2003, at only 10 years old, I fell asleep in the 7th inning of Game 7 of the ALCS. I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and turned on my TV to see continuous replays of Wakefield’s floating meatball sputtering toward Aaron Boone’s bat and subsequently rocketing into the atmosphere, at which point my howls of misery awoke my parents in the room next door.

This past Saturday, I found myself suddenly devoted to another team, another fan base, another history. Even I, so seasoned in the art of sports viewing, could not comprehend the scene that I witnessed – that I was a part of – in Athens, Ga. this weekend.

Two weeks ago a friend from Bowdoin called me with the idea to visit a high school buddy in Georgia for a match up of top ten teams, LSU and UGA. At first, I had to tell him that my summer job of painting houses for a month did not supply me with the adequate funds necessary to undertake this voyage. But the idea stewed in my mind, and I could not quell my enthusiasm any longer. With a loan from the First Bank of Dad, the trip became a reality. On Friday, four of my best high school friends and I descended on Athens where our gracious host introduced us to life in a major college football town.

We arrived in Athens around 11 p.m on Friday. On both sides of the street intoxicated minors clad in red and black streamed out of frat houses. Outside our friend Bradley’s house, a sloppy pledge laid down some freestyle beats on stage in the parking lot in front of 100 or so people. Later, our contingent joined the revelry downtown where it seemed that the doormen at every bar had very poor eyes.

I saw guys with Ralph Lauren polos and boaters and girls in short sun dresses and cowboy boots. Every bar played the same songs but got the same excited reaction every time. Apparently, a lot of college students have the same ‘f****** problem’.

When Saturday morning began, around 8:30 a.m., the party began with it. Right outside our door a band played live in front of a few hundred rowdy Dawgs fans. Dozens of tents shaded tailgaters playing corn hole. A giant smoker produced delicious brisket that had begun cooking the day before.

Around 11:30 a.m. we crossed the road to enter the main quad where the College GameDay crew had set up shop. Swarms of fans from LSU and UGA held signs and hollered their approval or displeasure with every opinion offered by the show’s hosts. Three hours of tailgating later, the game began.

Running solely on adrenaline, I cheered and lamented with every ebb and flow of the roller coaster contest along with 85,000 other Dawgs fans. When LSU countered a Dawgs score with one of their own, the few sections of purple and yellow outdid the vast majority with their chants of “Geaux Tigers!” The red and black responded with “Glory, glory, glory Georgia, and to Hell with LSU!”

The game went back and forth seemingly every drive, and with only a few minutes left the ball was in the hands of UGA quarterback Aaron Murray, who then conducted a near-perfect drive to give the Dawgs a three-point lead. On the ensuing drive the crowd roared as it tried to affect the LSU offense. With each incompletion, the crowd’s fervor, and my own, increased. When the ball hit the ground on 4th down and Georgia sealed its victory, the stadium exploded.

On my drive back to the College on Sunday afternoon, I thought about how connected I felt to those people in the last moments of that game. I still felt the intensity in that stadium of 92,000 and the joy of the Mardi Gras-like crowd roaming the streets of downtown later that night. I had gone on the vacation of a lifetime, sandwiched between class on Friday and Monday morning. I lived in a different world for a day, and what a day it was.

Dawgs on top.

View Joe Macdonald's tweets from his trip below.






















Comments
More
Popular