ESPN - Boise State Broncos vs. Oregon Ducks Photos, September 20 2008 - NCAA College Football

My alma mater gets its first road win ever against a PAC-10 team.  We’ve beaten Oregon State twice in Boise.  (Yes, I know, I live in Oregon now, I’m married to a Duck, and I call myself “the Red State Refugee”, but football has its own rules of loyalty.)  I attended BSU (where the BS comes before U) 1985-89 and during that time we were 1-AA and getting whipped for 13 years straight by the hated Idaho Vandals (where Sarah Palin had just recently graduated) in the season-ending instate rivalry game.  For the 1985 season, I was the alternate for the school mascot, Buster Bronco, which is a job kinda like vice president - you only work if the main guy gets sick or dies.  So these last few years of Bronco football, with top 25 rankings and WAC dominance and mentions on EPSN and undefeated seasons and winning the greatest college football bowl game ever, is a sweet sweet time for me, not unlike growing up a Packers fan in the 1980s and then enjoying Green Bay in the Super Bowl.

Some people mock those of us into football or other inferior sports.  And, honestly, it can be rather mockworthy.  We’re really rooting for colored laundry.  It’s not like I personally know any Broncos or Packers.  Yeah, the players in orange and blue go to the same school I went to, but that campus today doesn’t hardly resemble any Boise State that I ever attended.  And, whoo, the guys from my school won, which means that my school is… what, exactly?

However, sports is often the only place a person can really get emotional.  I bounced around like a six-year-old on Red Bull last week as the Packers rolled it up on the Lions.  Today I’m shouting “Yes!” as I get the latest update on the Broncos game on my BlackBerry.

Sports give you a cultural connection in this incredibly diverse country.  I flew around the country in the 90s and everywhere I landed I could find some group of fans enjoying the game I wanted to see.  A shared experience that can bring out strong opinions and emotions and release a few of our inhibitions and reveal our personalities, with complete strangers in a brand new city, with no risk of any serious disagreements.

And sports is one of those few things where we can believe in right and wrong, that the talented, hard-working, and deserving will win, where controversies will be reviewed by an impartial judge, and even in those cases where refs are biased and instant replays are blown, we at least get to see seven replays in slo-mo hi-def and the public knows the indisputable truth.

Sports give us - give me - three hours where George Bush doesn’t exist and people don’t just ignore subpoenas and trillions aren’t bled away in an orgy of greed and the planet isn’t melting away, and I can just feel the joy of cheering for young men in plastic armor carrying an oblate spheroid over a chalk line.