Each fall, I return to Nebraska Avenue psyched about the upcoming collegiate soccer, field hockey, and volleyball seasons.
Sure, the annual thrill of dropping dead inches short of a Patriot League men's basketball title and an NCAA bid each March is worth the price of tuition alone.
And springs filled with the controlled chaos of team tennis's six simultaneous matches and women's lacrosse's indefinable boundaries are a lot of fun.
But fall - you know, that season when AU teams now only qualify for, but actually win games in NCAA tournaments (field hockey, men's soccer) - is the best time to be an Eagle.
Yet, without fail, my fall is always ruined when, while stampeding over a Caribbean island's worth of students at MGC because I'm three minutes late to class, I overhear one of the following musings from the typical, insatiable AU student.
"Man, it would be cool if we had a football team."
"Yeah, it sucks that we don't have football."
"If we had football, maybe this school would have a little spirit."
Excuse me? It's more like, "If we had spirit, maybe this school would have a little football." If only we knew what spirit was.
I can't speak for anyone other than myself and the ten strangers who left Rolling Rock bottles spewed across my apartment floor after watching the Ohio State-Texas game last weekend.
But I'm guessing, for a lot of people, the appeal of college football is not the game, but the party culture. Yet, for anyone who has traveled to a real football school (Georgetown with its Bad News Hoyas doesn't count) spirit goes beyond pre-gaming, post-gaming or even in-gaming.
As Lavar Burton would say, "You don't have to take my word for it." This Saturday, ride Metro to the University of Maryland, where some 50,000 people will swarm all over campus before the 'Terps' clash with the West Virginia Mountaineers.
There, you'll see enough gridlock to set the College Park/Metro shuttle buses literally hours behind schedule. You might spy weary students peering out their windows at 11 a.m. after waking to the hollering of intoxicated alumni walking through their dormitory courtyards toward.
And at the student stadium gate, you'll see a queue longer than the TDR line for chicken tenders during a nationwide red meat and pizza famine.
For a football school, this is all part of the deal. So is a room draw process based on computer-generated numbers. So is the student ticket lottery, which punishes you for now showing up to previous games by decreasing your chances. And so is the reality that you're more likely to receive a full scholarship for your 40-yard-dash time than you are for your G.P.A.
If that doesn't jar you, perhaps this will. Go to any big school on Saturday night after the football team or men's basketball team loses at home. Try to find a party. I dare you. And I don't think they have a Guapo's there.
There, they suffer through the lows as much as they party through the highs. It's hard to imagine that mentality - you know, spirit - at the school too small for your personal space and too big for seven coffee shops.
Here, students set their watches by the AU shuttle schedule, their vehicle away from redundant college life and into the real world of internships, jobs, monuments, bars, clubs, restaurants and - most importantly - FCUK. Here, upperclassmen are startled, not comforted, by the strange new faces on the quad each fall.
That's why most of us are here. We came to find a close-knit community, and to escape Generic U or Random Tech.
And if you don't like it here, well, you probably came because you got financial aid that, at other schools, would've gone to a football player.
