Shortly after the final whistle sounds for the final game in late November, the exodus begins. Fans walk out of the gates, senior football players gather on the field for a few last pictures in their home stadium and the staff and workers under the stadium begin to close up for the year.
In the parking lots, some fans pack up to hit the road, while others linger for some last moments tailgating with friends and family. The home season closes.
Already within minutes, as coaches, players and media members representing and covering both teams gather to ask and answer questions, in other parts of the stadium the long offseason begins. Underneath the stadium, ushers, security personnel and concession workers turn in coats or vests, close up shop and say goodbye to coworkers they see seven Saturdays a year. Happy Thanksgiving greetings are passed. “See you next year,” is said.
It is bittersweet. These are the seven days that everyone from players to coaches to maintenance staff, to ushers and everyone in between spend the other 358 days preparing for and looking forward to. These are the days when the memories, both good and bad, are stamped into our minds forever.
And with the passing of the last home game, it marks the end of another year of tradition. The early sunsets that mark November across the gray midwestern skies mean the cathedrals of college football fall silent as the final home whistle sounds. From Memorial Stadium in Lincoln to Camp Randall, the Big House, the Horseshoe and Beaver Stadium, college football is uniquely bound by tradition. Next year The LA Coliseum, Rose Bowl and Autzen and Husky stadiums join the ranks of Big Ten football tradition that includes the Birthplace of College Football at Rutgers.
The Big Ten is following the game’s history. The college game grew from its provincial East Coast, Ivy League roots to grow westward, southward until reaching its manifest destiny on the Pacific Coast.
In college football’s greatest cathedrals each Saturday a fervor bordering on a religious pilgrimage takes hold. And on those hallowed gridirons a passion play takes place, it’s ending unknown to all but God almighty. We roll along with the swells of emotion, tossed by the ebb and flow of the game’s momentum.
In each locale, families and friends repeat traditions week by week and year after year that become ingrained in the fabric of their identity. Summer days are filled with expectations. The returning veteran defense or the new five-star quarterback recruit will finally lift their team over the most hated of rivals. And as each season unfolds, the story is told in weekly chapters filling us with joy or leaving us wishing we could change one or two plays to alter the game’s outcome.
That is the passion of the game. Your university and your history are part of you forever. You cannot cut that connection out, like you can’t change the DNA of what makes you who you are. It runs that deep.
And that is why the closing of each home season is such a lonely moment. Some of the people we saw each week we will not see for several months. Some of us may be gone by the season’s start nine months hence.
Some are battling health issues and may already suspect that next season is a long shot. But hope’s light must endure amid the fading daylight of late November. While hope still exists, for all of us attuned to the realization of our own mortality, we know that tomorrow is promised to no one.
Tomorrow and next season always represent the great hope. As the dreams of August become the reality of November and another season passes, the seasons are almost universally sure to disappoint the loftiest dreams. Only one team gets to mount that summit each year. For the other 130 or so teams, they are left to ponder the what ifs.
College football stadiums may host other events, but the heart and the soul of the stadium is the unscripted reality drama of a college game day. Across the years I’ve walked empty stadiums during daylight and in the darkness. At night you can sense the ghosts. The ghosts of young men whose fleeting moments of immortality faded far faster than they would ever realize. I understand those ghosts, and sometimes I talk to them.
Even as players and teams return for reunions, they can never recapture that glory. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured that elusive immortality in the character Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “[He] had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.”
Only the strongest of football souls ever grasp the life balance between football and the life that follows. Even victorious Roman generals were reminded by a voice in their ear as they rode triumphantly into the city “Fame is fleeting….fame is fleeting…” Soon others will take their place in those uniforms.
As we leave the parking lot one last time, we think about the unrealized goals of September just passed and the new hope of September ahead. We wonder who will be there to share it with us. And as we see the sun slip beyond the western horizon, we even understand that someday the sun will rise on a September season without us…
Just days ago, by Sunday afternoon, the last of the overnight RVs and campers were all gone. Flocks of crows circled grass lots to spot and secure the last forgotten bits of food dropped by tailgaters. They too will miss a football season of easy leftovers. Within days the trademark blue porta-potties will start to disappear from those acres of parking. The lines of parking spaces painted on the grass will fade with the coming of winter.
But on that last Sunday afternoon as I drove the lots one last time, I was reminded of the great final passage from Fitzgerald’s classic: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
It was then, under a small line of trees with our house of football worship rising behind, I saw the last camper. The past and present were colliding, and the last camper seemed reluctant to press into the future. Perhaps they knew that our RVs, our campers were their boats against the current.
