Homecoming Game 2023: All score, no board (plus I was adopted)
The game this year was going to be different no matter what. With Dr. K not doing the marching band anymore, at the very least I would be sitting someplace differently. (He was judging a marching band competition, so even though he's now a student, he would be elsewhere for the game.) That also meant that I didn't have to get to the game early to catch everything the band did and to secure my spot with them, so even though I'd planned to leave early, I really didn't. Meh.
And then I got to Naperville and realized *why* I'd been getting there early: Parking is crazy. At least it looked like the big parking deck was back to normal after having been under construction earlier in the year. I even passed up a sweet parking spot on the first level because I knew I wouldn't be back in under three hours, then wondered if I'd screwed myself. Luckily I found a great spot on the third level, right next to the little pass-through to start going down to the exit, so that worked out. Based on the fancily-dressed high school students I saw, it was homecoming for one of the area schools as well. Too bad we can't coordinate that, like have NCC's, NCHS's, and NNHS's homecomings at different times. Oh well.
Getting down to the stadium showed me every single alumni in the history of the college that's still alive apparently came to this game. The line was unbelievable. And I know it was making the ticket people crazed, because my ticket cost me $8, and I gave the guy a $20 (I think he was a student), and he tried to give me $8 in change. Um... I totally got it, and once he realized what he'd done he was apologetic, but I wonder if anyone else had that happen to them. Hey, automatic donations to the school and football team! Woo!
So then I had to get into line, and the line at that time was so long it practically reached the fieldhouse. In short order it not only reached the fieldhouse, it then wrapped around the adjacent bouncy house. And that was one line! There was a second line to get into the stadium that went around the front of the fieldhouse, holy cow. There was a guy in front of me and a guy behind me, and some dude showed up and knew the front guy. He turned around and asked the dude behind me...but not me...if it was okay if the dude cut. Whatever. We're all going to the same place. And then a woman showed up, likely a spouse of one of the front dudes, and the first front guy went, that's it, I don't know anybody else, nobody else gets to cut. And then this heavy bearded dude showed up, and he was like going between the front and back dude, and ended up in front of me too eventually, and then by the time we got up to the ticket area there were like ten people ahead of me that weren't there when we started. The guy behind me even ended up in front of me at one point. He and I started talking because he was saying, this line is insane! I've never seen it like this! I don't think I've ever missed kickoff before! So he's pulled up the livestream of the game on his phone, and while I can't hear it I figure out that it's the coin toss, so the game has started and we're still outside. I mentioned how I was here in the '90s and we were lucky to have .500 teams at that time. The guy went, I played in the '90s, and you're totally right. Turned out he graduated in '98. I told him I was in the pep band, and he said there wasn't much to be peppy about in those days. True. But we still had fun.
Once inside, I filled my water bottle and went to the bathroom before heading into the seating area, and as one might expect with the lines as long as they were, the seating area was pretty well packed. I actually went up a farther set of stairs and crossed over to the side nearer to the band, having found some empty bleacher seats on that side. I was up pretty high, at least 3/4 of the way up, though I didn't make the connection until much later. I could see the band pretty well, though. Shortly after I got there, this girl and three guys sat behind me, and she was on the phone with someone trying to get them to find her, which they did eventually. That ended up being her parents. I would spend the majority of the game with them and essentially got adopted by the group, and by the end of the game I'd learned that the parents were Jeff and Chris; Jeff graduated in '92; their daughter, Sophie, is a senior and was in the Chorale, so I'd actually seen her perform the night before; and the guys she was with were her band--not students and not her siblings, though clearly they knew her parents. This explained the one guy who kept trying to make "Let's Go Birds" happen as a chant and was confused why nobody else was going for that. He went, but Cardinals has too many syllables! Halfway through the second quarter, I finally went, Cards. Let's go Cards. The facepalm was felt but not actually done. (That guy was special enough that Jeff tried to get me to adopt him. Sorry, I'm good.)
Part of why we bonded had to do with the scoreboard. So, I get there, and the time on the board reads 15:45, and the score is 0-0. We played Carroll College (this is where my work's high school helper ended up, by the way), and the first score I saw was them making a touchdown. Oh, no. Don't tell me they're actually on top! But when the announcer read off the score, the Cards had 7 and Carroll had 7. (They're the Pioneers. There were multiple Oregon Trail-type jokes made by the crew.) And, like, 14 seconds later, the Cards scored a touchdown themselves so it didn't matter. That one was amazing; the receiver made a 98-yard kick return for a touchdown, the longest in school history. Then Carroll scored again, but the Cards scored again themselves, and I think that one had the forward flip into the end zone that was pretty sweet. We were really hoping for instant replay on that--I actually don't think the dude caught the ball; his teammate did, but it was a sweet move Simone Biles would admire--but the scoreboard was still frozen at 15:45, 0-0. For the entire game, we had no way to know the score by looking at anything. Our beautiful new scoreboard, which has only been around post-pandemic, must only have had a one-year warranty. Now we were kickin' it old school, having to remember the score ourselves. And, um, my new friends had been enjoying the tailgating area, wherever that was, and smelled a bit medicinal (liquid form), so they weren't going to be remembering something like that. That's where I came in. I kept up with the score for a long time, but around the third quarter, when the Cards had pulled pretty far ahead and Carroll stopped scoring for the most part, I kind of stopped caring. But the group was joking that the announcer was an introvert, since he was fairly dry in what he was saying; I think they were expecting him to be like a radio color commenter. That's not his job, but whatever. Since I knew the score, Jeff kept saying I should be the color guy. I said I would tell boring stories about my time at school. He was fine with that.
This game was full of penalty flags. Holy crap. You almost couldn't get through a down without a flag being thrown. Toward the end of the game, when we were cold (it was in the 50s) and Carroll clearly wasn't going to score 50 points in the next 12 minutes, we were sort of like, mercy rule, just let the clock run, stop calling penalties! And, for my amusement, I got to watch trombone D, here acting as one of the drum majors, toss a flag toward the band! Holy cow. Now, granted, they deserved it; they'd totally borked something and it sounded not great, and D pulled the flag out and threw it at them. When I talked to D after the game, they told me one of the parents gave it to them, and they'd thrown the flag a few times during the game. Oh, how funny.
I temporarily got abandoned during halftime and a good portion of the third quarter. I didn't mind so much while the band was performing; enough people around me left that I was able to watch the band and see them pretty clearly; nobody blocked my view. It was around when the band was performing that the scoreboard went black. Prior to halftime, the group with me had been joking about it, saying, did you try turning it off and turning it back on? Have you unplugged it and plugged it back in? Just anything to try rebooting it and getting it working again. Whatever circuit it's on must be related to the baseball stadium lights, because those turned off and turned back on and appeared to freak out, because they were blinking, changing colors, flashing, just doing all this weird stuff before finally settling down, but the scoreboard never turned back on. When the group finally returned, I said, okay, be honest, which one of you did that? They laughed.
Meanwhile, back on the field for halftime, the show this year was based on Queen and included several songs in the medley like Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You, and a couple more I can't think of. The band is smaller so the forms they made on the field weren't as large, and when the music went woodwind only, they could hardly be heard. That was a bummer, but they looked pretty good. Jeff was also asking me about instruments, as he wondered what the curvy big horn was. That's a sousaphone. He then wondered if there was a difference in the names of the instruments since one sousaphone was silver/metal and the other was white/fiberglass. No, they're both still sousaphones; they're just made of different materials. M, whom I'd run into after the concert, had the silver one and had it hanging over his right shoulder after he came back; Jeff wondered if that one was worn differently. No, M just hasn't put it on all the way; it's supposed to go over his head and rest on his left shoulder. Jeff was super impressed and said he liked to learn something new every day, so that was one of the things he'd learned at the game. The other was finding out NCC doubles up on numbers for their football players. I told him I realized that when a former student of mine, who is Black, ended up on NCC's football team years ago, but when I tried to find his number on the field, I could only spot a pair of white legs. Jeff was stunned to hear they'd do that, in part because he counted the number of players on the field and sideline and only came up with 80. There would be probably 120 based on the numbers doubled up in the program. He also asked about number 77, who had an unusual build--5'10", 294 pounds. (And actually, there are two 77s on the team, but the other is taller.) He stood out to Jeff, but when I went to search for him on the field and sideline, he was hard to spot; he was sitting on a bench with a bunch of other players around him, so I joked that he was my Where's Waldo. Eh, it gave me something to do.
The game ended with a score of 69-24, I believe. We missed a PAT at one point. I went down and got some pictures of the band playing the fight song post game (see, it got played...and nobody sang along to it...), but had gone back to my seat before they did the Alma Mater. Oops. I wasn't sure what would happen since now they're doing fireworks post game. The school waited until immediately after the band finished the Alma Mater--like, seriously perfect timing--and then the fireworks started to go off. They'd announced it as a light show and fireworks display, and I said to Jeff, uh, I hope the scoreboard wasn't part of the light show... And I don't recall there being a light show in any form aside from when the baseball lights freaked out. The fireworks display was pretty good, though. There was a point where it seemed like the end, but in reality it was only halfway through. Still, Jeff was pretty bummed that the scoreboard didn't work. He said, I pay $52,000 in tuition; where is that money going? I said, that kid's not paying his tuition apparently. (Oh, and his other daughter is a sophomore at Kansas. He asked, are you on TikTok? No, I told him. He went, neither am I, but that daughter, Sydney, makes thousands of dollars on there. I said to him, so it sounds like you're only paying for one tuition! He said, naw, that's her pocket money. But hey, good for her.)
Overall, it could've been a not-great experience, but ending up with this random family worked out pretty well. By the end, Jeff was even offering to buy me popcorn from the concession stand, but it was well into the fourth quarter and I was fine. Chris hoped for a hot pretzel, emphasis on hot, but that mission was impossible. I did laugh at the reactions of the guys in Sophie's band to the marching band; they loved the reggaeton beat they were playing, that the song they played for first downs was the Ironman song, that sort of thing. Now that was actually fun for me.
Finally, a few random things from after the game. I said hi to D, trumpet E, and M the director. When the band was announced, she was called Dr. M. ...She does not have a doctorate. I told her, Dr. K has lots of degrees; you can just take one. He's not even here! Screw him, heh. They thought that was pretty funny. But I did congratulate her on taking over the band. She also let me know that the scoreboard had been working the day before and earlier in the day; it worked for the two soccer matches played in the afternoon. Weird. I then walked out of the seating area but pulled over by a little table to reach out to Dr. K to tell him some highlights and see if he was still judging. (I'm guessing yes since he didn't get back to me until today.) I then saw a few alums I knew, Rosie and Brad...who were walking with Kristi, the gal who'd sat in front of me at the concert and had redone the fight song. Well hello everyone. That was just a quick hi-bye. Once I got outside, I spotted the big crane Jeff had mentioned; they're building a parking deck across from the fieldhouse! Finally! They've only needed that for at least 30 years. And finally, while walking back up to Chicago Avenue and taking the walkway next to the newest science building, I passed a group that included a guy with a crutch, the sort with the arm cuff you see on someone who uses a crutch daily. Soon after I did that, here comes the guy and an older woman (like my age) running past me. Wow, dude can move pretty fast. I think he beat the woman to whatever point they were going toward, and another person said to her that her whisky privileges were revoked. Heh. The guy just put the crutch back on his arm and kept walking after that. That was pretty amusing.
And then I got to Naperville and realized *why* I'd been getting there early: Parking is crazy. At least it looked like the big parking deck was back to normal after having been under construction earlier in the year. I even passed up a sweet parking spot on the first level because I knew I wouldn't be back in under three hours, then wondered if I'd screwed myself. Luckily I found a great spot on the third level, right next to the little pass-through to start going down to the exit, so that worked out. Based on the fancily-dressed high school students I saw, it was homecoming for one of the area schools as well. Too bad we can't coordinate that, like have NCC's, NCHS's, and NNHS's homecomings at different times. Oh well.
Getting down to the stadium showed me every single alumni in the history of the college that's still alive apparently came to this game. The line was unbelievable. And I know it was making the ticket people crazed, because my ticket cost me $8, and I gave the guy a $20 (I think he was a student), and he tried to give me $8 in change. Um... I totally got it, and once he realized what he'd done he was apologetic, but I wonder if anyone else had that happen to them. Hey, automatic donations to the school and football team! Woo!
So then I had to get into line, and the line at that time was so long it practically reached the fieldhouse. In short order it not only reached the fieldhouse, it then wrapped around the adjacent bouncy house. And that was one line! There was a second line to get into the stadium that went around the front of the fieldhouse, holy cow. There was a guy in front of me and a guy behind me, and some dude showed up and knew the front guy. He turned around and asked the dude behind me...but not me...if it was okay if the dude cut. Whatever. We're all going to the same place. And then a woman showed up, likely a spouse of one of the front dudes, and the first front guy went, that's it, I don't know anybody else, nobody else gets to cut. And then this heavy bearded dude showed up, and he was like going between the front and back dude, and ended up in front of me too eventually, and then by the time we got up to the ticket area there were like ten people ahead of me that weren't there when we started. The guy behind me even ended up in front of me at one point. He and I started talking because he was saying, this line is insane! I've never seen it like this! I don't think I've ever missed kickoff before! So he's pulled up the livestream of the game on his phone, and while I can't hear it I figure out that it's the coin toss, so the game has started and we're still outside. I mentioned how I was here in the '90s and we were lucky to have .500 teams at that time. The guy went, I played in the '90s, and you're totally right. Turned out he graduated in '98. I told him I was in the pep band, and he said there wasn't much to be peppy about in those days. True. But we still had fun.
Once inside, I filled my water bottle and went to the bathroom before heading into the seating area, and as one might expect with the lines as long as they were, the seating area was pretty well packed. I actually went up a farther set of stairs and crossed over to the side nearer to the band, having found some empty bleacher seats on that side. I was up pretty high, at least 3/4 of the way up, though I didn't make the connection until much later. I could see the band pretty well, though. Shortly after I got there, this girl and three guys sat behind me, and she was on the phone with someone trying to get them to find her, which they did eventually. That ended up being her parents. I would spend the majority of the game with them and essentially got adopted by the group, and by the end of the game I'd learned that the parents were Jeff and Chris; Jeff graduated in '92; their daughter, Sophie, is a senior and was in the Chorale, so I'd actually seen her perform the night before; and the guys she was with were her band--not students and not her siblings, though clearly they knew her parents. This explained the one guy who kept trying to make "Let's Go Birds" happen as a chant and was confused why nobody else was going for that. He went, but Cardinals has too many syllables! Halfway through the second quarter, I finally went, Cards. Let's go Cards. The facepalm was felt but not actually done. (That guy was special enough that Jeff tried to get me to adopt him. Sorry, I'm good.)
Part of why we bonded had to do with the scoreboard. So, I get there, and the time on the board reads 15:45, and the score is 0-0. We played Carroll College (this is where my work's high school helper ended up, by the way), and the first score I saw was them making a touchdown. Oh, no. Don't tell me they're actually on top! But when the announcer read off the score, the Cards had 7 and Carroll had 7. (They're the Pioneers. There were multiple Oregon Trail-type jokes made by the crew.) And, like, 14 seconds later, the Cards scored a touchdown themselves so it didn't matter. That one was amazing; the receiver made a 98-yard kick return for a touchdown, the longest in school history. Then Carroll scored again, but the Cards scored again themselves, and I think that one had the forward flip into the end zone that was pretty sweet. We were really hoping for instant replay on that--I actually don't think the dude caught the ball; his teammate did, but it was a sweet move Simone Biles would admire--but the scoreboard was still frozen at 15:45, 0-0. For the entire game, we had no way to know the score by looking at anything. Our beautiful new scoreboard, which has only been around post-pandemic, must only have had a one-year warranty. Now we were kickin' it old school, having to remember the score ourselves. And, um, my new friends had been enjoying the tailgating area, wherever that was, and smelled a bit medicinal (liquid form), so they weren't going to be remembering something like that. That's where I came in. I kept up with the score for a long time, but around the third quarter, when the Cards had pulled pretty far ahead and Carroll stopped scoring for the most part, I kind of stopped caring. But the group was joking that the announcer was an introvert, since he was fairly dry in what he was saying; I think they were expecting him to be like a radio color commenter. That's not his job, but whatever. Since I knew the score, Jeff kept saying I should be the color guy. I said I would tell boring stories about my time at school. He was fine with that.
This game was full of penalty flags. Holy crap. You almost couldn't get through a down without a flag being thrown. Toward the end of the game, when we were cold (it was in the 50s) and Carroll clearly wasn't going to score 50 points in the next 12 minutes, we were sort of like, mercy rule, just let the clock run, stop calling penalties! And, for my amusement, I got to watch trombone D, here acting as one of the drum majors, toss a flag toward the band! Holy cow. Now, granted, they deserved it; they'd totally borked something and it sounded not great, and D pulled the flag out and threw it at them. When I talked to D after the game, they told me one of the parents gave it to them, and they'd thrown the flag a few times during the game. Oh, how funny.
I temporarily got abandoned during halftime and a good portion of the third quarter. I didn't mind so much while the band was performing; enough people around me left that I was able to watch the band and see them pretty clearly; nobody blocked my view. It was around when the band was performing that the scoreboard went black. Prior to halftime, the group with me had been joking about it, saying, did you try turning it off and turning it back on? Have you unplugged it and plugged it back in? Just anything to try rebooting it and getting it working again. Whatever circuit it's on must be related to the baseball stadium lights, because those turned off and turned back on and appeared to freak out, because they were blinking, changing colors, flashing, just doing all this weird stuff before finally settling down, but the scoreboard never turned back on. When the group finally returned, I said, okay, be honest, which one of you did that? They laughed.
Meanwhile, back on the field for halftime, the show this year was based on Queen and included several songs in the medley like Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You, and a couple more I can't think of. The band is smaller so the forms they made on the field weren't as large, and when the music went woodwind only, they could hardly be heard. That was a bummer, but they looked pretty good. Jeff was also asking me about instruments, as he wondered what the curvy big horn was. That's a sousaphone. He then wondered if there was a difference in the names of the instruments since one sousaphone was silver/metal and the other was white/fiberglass. No, they're both still sousaphones; they're just made of different materials. M, whom I'd run into after the concert, had the silver one and had it hanging over his right shoulder after he came back; Jeff wondered if that one was worn differently. No, M just hasn't put it on all the way; it's supposed to go over his head and rest on his left shoulder. Jeff was super impressed and said he liked to learn something new every day, so that was one of the things he'd learned at the game. The other was finding out NCC doubles up on numbers for their football players. I told him I realized that when a former student of mine, who is Black, ended up on NCC's football team years ago, but when I tried to find his number on the field, I could only spot a pair of white legs. Jeff was stunned to hear they'd do that, in part because he counted the number of players on the field and sideline and only came up with 80. There would be probably 120 based on the numbers doubled up in the program. He also asked about number 77, who had an unusual build--5'10", 294 pounds. (And actually, there are two 77s on the team, but the other is taller.) He stood out to Jeff, but when I went to search for him on the field and sideline, he was hard to spot; he was sitting on a bench with a bunch of other players around him, so I joked that he was my Where's Waldo. Eh, it gave me something to do.
The game ended with a score of 69-24, I believe. We missed a PAT at one point. I went down and got some pictures of the band playing the fight song post game (see, it got played...and nobody sang along to it...), but had gone back to my seat before they did the Alma Mater. Oops. I wasn't sure what would happen since now they're doing fireworks post game. The school waited until immediately after the band finished the Alma Mater--like, seriously perfect timing--and then the fireworks started to go off. They'd announced it as a light show and fireworks display, and I said to Jeff, uh, I hope the scoreboard wasn't part of the light show... And I don't recall there being a light show in any form aside from when the baseball lights freaked out. The fireworks display was pretty good, though. There was a point where it seemed like the end, but in reality it was only halfway through. Still, Jeff was pretty bummed that the scoreboard didn't work. He said, I pay $52,000 in tuition; where is that money going? I said, that kid's not paying his tuition apparently. (Oh, and his other daughter is a sophomore at Kansas. He asked, are you on TikTok? No, I told him. He went, neither am I, but that daughter, Sydney, makes thousands of dollars on there. I said to him, so it sounds like you're only paying for one tuition! He said, naw, that's her pocket money. But hey, good for her.)
Overall, it could've been a not-great experience, but ending up with this random family worked out pretty well. By the end, Jeff was even offering to buy me popcorn from the concession stand, but it was well into the fourth quarter and I was fine. Chris hoped for a hot pretzel, emphasis on hot, but that mission was impossible. I did laugh at the reactions of the guys in Sophie's band to the marching band; they loved the reggaeton beat they were playing, that the song they played for first downs was the Ironman song, that sort of thing. Now that was actually fun for me.
Finally, a few random things from after the game. I said hi to D, trumpet E, and M the director. When the band was announced, she was called Dr. M. ...She does not have a doctorate. I told her, Dr. K has lots of degrees; you can just take one. He's not even here! Screw him, heh. They thought that was pretty funny. But I did congratulate her on taking over the band. She also let me know that the scoreboard had been working the day before and earlier in the day; it worked for the two soccer matches played in the afternoon. Weird. I then walked out of the seating area but pulled over by a little table to reach out to Dr. K to tell him some highlights and see if he was still judging. (I'm guessing yes since he didn't get back to me until today.) I then saw a few alums I knew, Rosie and Brad...who were walking with Kristi, the gal who'd sat in front of me at the concert and had redone the fight song. Well hello everyone. That was just a quick hi-bye. Once I got outside, I spotted the big crane Jeff had mentioned; they're building a parking deck across from the fieldhouse! Finally! They've only needed that for at least 30 years. And finally, while walking back up to Chicago Avenue and taking the walkway next to the newest science building, I passed a group that included a guy with a crutch, the sort with the arm cuff you see on someone who uses a crutch daily. Soon after I did that, here comes the guy and an older woman (like my age) running past me. Wow, dude can move pretty fast. I think he beat the woman to whatever point they were going toward, and another person said to her that her whisky privileges were revoked. Heh. The guy just put the crutch back on his arm and kept walking after that. That was pretty amusing.