GoldStampede
Well-Known Member
Perhaps its just the excitement surrounding the debut of Ralphie VI, the incredible and moving work of the crew that put together the video announcement, and the football season which lies just an hour away from kickoff, but I can't stop thinking today about how much this program has meant to me. Fowler's exclamation, that you can never forget the first time you saw Ralphie run, sent chills down my spine. This is going to be long, so buckle up, if you've got the patience for some cloying sentimentality and reflection.
I was born around the time of the '91 Orange Bowl. I feel a strange amount of pride around the idea that the first CU game after my birth was the program's first national title victory. My dad is still the biggest CU fan I know; he's loved the Buffs his entire life despite being born in Nebraska and growing up surrounded by red in rural Colorado. Of course, he raised me to be a fan of the Buffs. But, I didn't take easily to the fandom; I was not very naturally inclined to sports as a kid, often more preoccupied with video games and books. Yet my parents would send me to school clad in black and gold CU gear; I was a CU fan, whether or not I wanted to be. I will admit an early inner reluctance to this: I was constantly catching grief from the multitudes of fusker spawn at my elementary school. As a small kid in the 90s, this was not a fun dynamic. I knew the buffs were pretty great as far as college football teams went, but we were so close to the state that was home to perhaps the only team that grew to maintain unquestionable bragging rights over the buffs. As an introverted, thoughtful kid, I took the disposition as a fated underdog to heart, and at times it felt depressing to the point that I just got confused and fed up with the whole rivalry: why the hell do all these people identify so strongly with these college football teams? It's not like any of them were on the field, or, with a few rare exceptions, actually knew someone who was. The connections that filled their lives with energy on gamedays felt so arbitrary. What is it that causes these people, fusker or buff, lambie or whatever, to care so much about a stupid game? To place so much of their egos on a college football rivalry? To be driven to such feverous emotional highs and lows, based on the winner or loser of this athletic contest? It's a question I've thought about all my life, and I'm not sure the truth of it has come clear until very recently.
My dad started taking me along to CU games in the late 1990s. The first couple I went to, could have barely cared to have been there. I saw a big win and a big loss against the lambs, which I recall faintly, but I mostly just remember the band, and of course, Ralphie. The game itself? Not so much. I didn't understand football and all its rules, I didn't like sitting out in the sun, and I'd even bring a book or something to preoccupy me when the inevitably game bored me. What did it matter if the buffs won or lost? The nubs would always be better, and I'd have to take their fans' **** after thanksgiving break, just like always. But my attitude abruptly changed in 1999, during a fateful game against the hated corn. For the first three quarters of that contest, I tried my best not to pay attention as the buffs, once again, got pushed around by the corn. Of course I wanted CU to win, but I was convinced that it didn't matter; they couldn't. But then, something in the entire air changed: the buffs started pushing back. The change in energy as CU mounted their comeback was undeniable, and I became in tune with it completely. Suddenly, it was the buffs making the nubs look like they didn't know what they were doing. An older cousin was with us at the game and I remember him explaining to me that yes, the buffs really could come back and win; it was college football, and if you got the momentum, anything could happen. We all know the way the buffs fell short that day in 1999-- the buffs could not have come closer to pulling off their furious, electrifying comeback. It was gut wrenching - absolutely gut wrenching - to lose that way. I remember arguing in the stands with people around us if Aldrich’s at a game winning field goal was good or not. I had celebrated at first, as if it was. It was devastating to realize it wasn't, and there would be no second chances. Somehow, it was just obvious we would not be able to pull off the win in overtime. The momentum had left our sails. What would happen that day, is what I pessimistically believed would always happen. My heart was broken, but holy ****, did I become a true buff fan that day. It was then that I understood the power of that spectacle, the way an entire stadium full of people can be pulled into that exact same moment, focused on the same awe-inspiring thing at once. It is mystifying, undeniable, and charged with everything that can make life so exuberantly, beautifully delicate and worth living. From that day on, I embraced the buffs wholeheartedly. I talked smack back at the fusker twerps, I repped my buff gear with pride, I saw that the buffs could beat the huskers-- even deserved to. I told my dad, the next time the buffs faced the nubs in Folsom, he was going to bring me-- because we were going to ****ing win.
That day in 2001 is one of my favorite I've ever experienced, and unquestionably my favorite memory in sports. As always, the fuskers were so arrogant, not giving CU their due: "You guys are just the fifteenth best team in the nation-- NOBODY cares about the fifteenth ranked team in the nation." But that entire day, I had no doubt in my mind that CU was going to win. I sensed the same confidence in all ~50k buff fans I saw that afternoon-- there was no anxiety or trepidation in that home crowd, and certainly not after the first quarter. The game was essentially a nonstop highlight reel, and being there for it bordered on an outer body experience. Pure, unadulterated catharsis, a decade of frustrations relieved in one glorious afternoon. For the next couple of years, I couldn't help but imagine CU in the national championship picture. Those early/mid 00s seasons, while not without their moments, pale in comparison to the 90s heyday, but I could take it all in with a smirk-- we'd brought the nubs down crashing down to earth. That game reverberates dramatically to this day. And every weekend I spent at Folsom from then on, the more Boulder started to feel like my place-- my home.
I was lucky enough to attend the University of Colorado from 2009-2013. You could hardly find a worse time in history to be a CU student in terms of inspiring (or even watchable) football, but my attachment to the university and to Boulder gained deeper significance at that time. I made wonderful friendships, I learned a lot about myself, and I discovered how to appreciate and find beauty in the world around me. Like no other time in my life, I felt the vibrancy of a community. I carved out my niche, forged incredible friendships, found my spots on Pearl and The Hill. I fell in love for the first time, had my heart broken for the first time, and learned you can, indeed, fall love again. I finally got an idea of what I wanted to do with my life. More than anything, I felt my world opening up. My time as a CU student was a time of pure bliss. I recall being drunk on the hill at Cosmos one night, getting up to go to the bathroom, and stating at myself in the mirror for what was probably just a minute or two, but felt like hours, lost in a reverie: this time living in Boulder and going to CU was beautiful, it was undeniably powerful, it was swirling all around me and I had to catch hold of each experience, so as to savor it as completely as I could, because for the first time, I got to be exactly where I was supposed to be for longer than single flashes of shared excitement and celebration in a football game. There was no way for me, however, to feel wholehearted celebration upon graduation a few years later; beneath all the pride in my accomplishment, I knew I was about to leave my home, a place I would always miss, and always long to return to.
Around that time, it was hard to care much about CU football-- the team was terrible, and college football was changing in such a way that it was impossible to imagine the buffs ever competing for national titles. Where once I expected the buffs to be ranked, I now wondered if we ever would be again... yet I still watched the buffs play every weekend; I still searched for bright spots (and for several years, found none, until Sefo started making plays against pac 12 teams in 2014). I moved to Kansas, of all places, and got tired of explaining to Kansans what, exactly, happened to their former foe. And then, 2016 happened: Buried in work, overwhelmed with stress and far from home and full of longing for it, the buffs were... good?! With initial hesitation, I let myself believe in them wholeheartedly again. It didn't matter what was going on the rest of that year, if a game was on, I was being transported back home every time I watched. I made it back to watch us beat Utah to win the pac 12 south in person, I stormed the field and soaked in the fact that the buffs were a top ten team, that we had won the division, and I was once again exactly where I was supposed to be. CU football may not have maintained the greatness of that season, but I’ve had a hell of a lot more fun watching the buffs in this last half-decade than the one before it.
Flash forward to 2019. I believed I was with the woman I was going to marry. I told her she would not understand me and where I come from until she got to experience a game in Folsom with me and my family. Looking at the schedule, it was obvious which game would be my homecoming and her introduction. With both the buffs and nubs a shadow of the programs they were in my childhood, it would be dishonest to frame that weekend like a true return to the past, but for that afternoon, the spirits of times long gone were again conjured. Folsom was invaded by all these red-clad morons, deliriously out of touch with the reality I had accepted; It was so easy to despise them, just like old times. The way the buffs stormed back in that game gave me shades of the '99 contest. Would we blow it? Nah. These weren't the same fuskers; if you get a good shot on them, say a 99-yard flea flicker out of your own endzone, they whimper and fade. It was a perfect weekend and a remarkable homecoming. I could hardly imagine a better game to introduce my partner to such a special part of my life. There was this incredible poetry to the way everything aligned; the '19 game rhymed with the joy I felt in 2001, as we kicked the nubs further down the pitiful hole we first pushed them down. I looked at my life. Girlfriend, career, family, connections to the past... It was all right where it belonged.
...And then it wasn't. Things started falling apart for me near the end of 2019, and the whirlwind of **** that was 2020 hit like an ineluctable gut punch. Tucker, who I swore was the guy, left the buffs like a total scumbag; my relationship, with the girl I swore was the one, fell apart; I lost my job; the world spiraled into a pandemic and continued doubling down into its political turmoil. I was not where I belonged; I was everywhere else. The world felt like it was ending. Football season started in... November?! All the positivity and regularity I felt in 2019 was a painful, devastating lie. With the buffs going through the loss of their coach in such an underhanded, untimely way, I assumed there was no way the buffs would be good . When I prepared to watch the 2020 buffs make their debut against UCLA, I told myself I would be happy simply for the chance to see the buffs play any football whatsoever.
I don't think I have ever cried from a CU loss, and I've experienced my share of beatdowns and gut-wrenchers. But as I watched in awe how the buffs built a thoroughly convincing lead over the first two quarters, and as I sat there, completely alone and quarantined in my room, and the buffs kept making play after play, I couldn’t help but let the tears run down my face. This was it-- a surging, precious reminder of home, when so many of us needed it most. The buffs held on for their victory, built upon it, and made the mini-season that was 2020 such a treat to watch. Things have been so overwhelmingly difficult, but the buffs are still here; Ralphie is still running.
So what is it, exactly, that overwhelms so many of us and drives our fandom? That draws us all in, in such a mesmerized way? It's not something arbitrary, as I once thought; not in the slightest. It is family, it is friendship, it is an ability to rise from defeat and the will to continue striving toward the victories, and to savor those victories, because in them we remember what it means to be together, in them we get to celebrate a chance to be alive and breathing. We are temporarily relieved from the constant burden of the inevitable losses we all will face-- losses that have seemed all too palpable in recent times. But that anxiety of loss, it drifts away when we are all together in one place, where we're supposed to be, basking in victory, appreciating the world we share all around us. Navigating it feels possible when we harness the energies of these moments. CU, as a football team, as a place, as a shared spirit, has given me so many of these moments.
Will college football still exist when I'm my dad's age? I don't know. It certainly will be very different than it is now. But this much is certain: it's beautiful to have experienced life's toughest lessons as a constant member of the CU community. Maybe it's strange, looking back on all of this so deeply. But I'm sure many of you here can relate. The Ralphie VI video really made me think about all this. I am so excited to share this college football season with all of you.
**** 'em up.
I was born around the time of the '91 Orange Bowl. I feel a strange amount of pride around the idea that the first CU game after my birth was the program's first national title victory. My dad is still the biggest CU fan I know; he's loved the Buffs his entire life despite being born in Nebraska and growing up surrounded by red in rural Colorado. Of course, he raised me to be a fan of the Buffs. But, I didn't take easily to the fandom; I was not very naturally inclined to sports as a kid, often more preoccupied with video games and books. Yet my parents would send me to school clad in black and gold CU gear; I was a CU fan, whether or not I wanted to be. I will admit an early inner reluctance to this: I was constantly catching grief from the multitudes of fusker spawn at my elementary school. As a small kid in the 90s, this was not a fun dynamic. I knew the buffs were pretty great as far as college football teams went, but we were so close to the state that was home to perhaps the only team that grew to maintain unquestionable bragging rights over the buffs. As an introverted, thoughtful kid, I took the disposition as a fated underdog to heart, and at times it felt depressing to the point that I just got confused and fed up with the whole rivalry: why the hell do all these people identify so strongly with these college football teams? It's not like any of them were on the field, or, with a few rare exceptions, actually knew someone who was. The connections that filled their lives with energy on gamedays felt so arbitrary. What is it that causes these people, fusker or buff, lambie or whatever, to care so much about a stupid game? To place so much of their egos on a college football rivalry? To be driven to such feverous emotional highs and lows, based on the winner or loser of this athletic contest? It's a question I've thought about all my life, and I'm not sure the truth of it has come clear until very recently.
My dad started taking me along to CU games in the late 1990s. The first couple I went to, could have barely cared to have been there. I saw a big win and a big loss against the lambs, which I recall faintly, but I mostly just remember the band, and of course, Ralphie. The game itself? Not so much. I didn't understand football and all its rules, I didn't like sitting out in the sun, and I'd even bring a book or something to preoccupy me when the inevitably game bored me. What did it matter if the buffs won or lost? The nubs would always be better, and I'd have to take their fans' **** after thanksgiving break, just like always. But my attitude abruptly changed in 1999, during a fateful game against the hated corn. For the first three quarters of that contest, I tried my best not to pay attention as the buffs, once again, got pushed around by the corn. Of course I wanted CU to win, but I was convinced that it didn't matter; they couldn't. But then, something in the entire air changed: the buffs started pushing back. The change in energy as CU mounted their comeback was undeniable, and I became in tune with it completely. Suddenly, it was the buffs making the nubs look like they didn't know what they were doing. An older cousin was with us at the game and I remember him explaining to me that yes, the buffs really could come back and win; it was college football, and if you got the momentum, anything could happen. We all know the way the buffs fell short that day in 1999-- the buffs could not have come closer to pulling off their furious, electrifying comeback. It was gut wrenching - absolutely gut wrenching - to lose that way. I remember arguing in the stands with people around us if Aldrich’s at a game winning field goal was good or not. I had celebrated at first, as if it was. It was devastating to realize it wasn't, and there would be no second chances. Somehow, it was just obvious we would not be able to pull off the win in overtime. The momentum had left our sails. What would happen that day, is what I pessimistically believed would always happen. My heart was broken, but holy ****, did I become a true buff fan that day. It was then that I understood the power of that spectacle, the way an entire stadium full of people can be pulled into that exact same moment, focused on the same awe-inspiring thing at once. It is mystifying, undeniable, and charged with everything that can make life so exuberantly, beautifully delicate and worth living. From that day on, I embraced the buffs wholeheartedly. I talked smack back at the fusker twerps, I repped my buff gear with pride, I saw that the buffs could beat the huskers-- even deserved to. I told my dad, the next time the buffs faced the nubs in Folsom, he was going to bring me-- because we were going to ****ing win.
That day in 2001 is one of my favorite I've ever experienced, and unquestionably my favorite memory in sports. As always, the fuskers were so arrogant, not giving CU their due: "You guys are just the fifteenth best team in the nation-- NOBODY cares about the fifteenth ranked team in the nation." But that entire day, I had no doubt in my mind that CU was going to win. I sensed the same confidence in all ~50k buff fans I saw that afternoon-- there was no anxiety or trepidation in that home crowd, and certainly not after the first quarter. The game was essentially a nonstop highlight reel, and being there for it bordered on an outer body experience. Pure, unadulterated catharsis, a decade of frustrations relieved in one glorious afternoon. For the next couple of years, I couldn't help but imagine CU in the national championship picture. Those early/mid 00s seasons, while not without their moments, pale in comparison to the 90s heyday, but I could take it all in with a smirk-- we'd brought the nubs down crashing down to earth. That game reverberates dramatically to this day. And every weekend I spent at Folsom from then on, the more Boulder started to feel like my place-- my home.
I was lucky enough to attend the University of Colorado from 2009-2013. You could hardly find a worse time in history to be a CU student in terms of inspiring (or even watchable) football, but my attachment to the university and to Boulder gained deeper significance at that time. I made wonderful friendships, I learned a lot about myself, and I discovered how to appreciate and find beauty in the world around me. Like no other time in my life, I felt the vibrancy of a community. I carved out my niche, forged incredible friendships, found my spots on Pearl and The Hill. I fell in love for the first time, had my heart broken for the first time, and learned you can, indeed, fall love again. I finally got an idea of what I wanted to do with my life. More than anything, I felt my world opening up. My time as a CU student was a time of pure bliss. I recall being drunk on the hill at Cosmos one night, getting up to go to the bathroom, and stating at myself in the mirror for what was probably just a minute or two, but felt like hours, lost in a reverie: this time living in Boulder and going to CU was beautiful, it was undeniably powerful, it was swirling all around me and I had to catch hold of each experience, so as to savor it as completely as I could, because for the first time, I got to be exactly where I was supposed to be for longer than single flashes of shared excitement and celebration in a football game. There was no way for me, however, to feel wholehearted celebration upon graduation a few years later; beneath all the pride in my accomplishment, I knew I was about to leave my home, a place I would always miss, and always long to return to.
Around that time, it was hard to care much about CU football-- the team was terrible, and college football was changing in such a way that it was impossible to imagine the buffs ever competing for national titles. Where once I expected the buffs to be ranked, I now wondered if we ever would be again... yet I still watched the buffs play every weekend; I still searched for bright spots (and for several years, found none, until Sefo started making plays against pac 12 teams in 2014). I moved to Kansas, of all places, and got tired of explaining to Kansans what, exactly, happened to their former foe. And then, 2016 happened: Buried in work, overwhelmed with stress and far from home and full of longing for it, the buffs were... good?! With initial hesitation, I let myself believe in them wholeheartedly again. It didn't matter what was going on the rest of that year, if a game was on, I was being transported back home every time I watched. I made it back to watch us beat Utah to win the pac 12 south in person, I stormed the field and soaked in the fact that the buffs were a top ten team, that we had won the division, and I was once again exactly where I was supposed to be. CU football may not have maintained the greatness of that season, but I’ve had a hell of a lot more fun watching the buffs in this last half-decade than the one before it.
Flash forward to 2019. I believed I was with the woman I was going to marry. I told her she would not understand me and where I come from until she got to experience a game in Folsom with me and my family. Looking at the schedule, it was obvious which game would be my homecoming and her introduction. With both the buffs and nubs a shadow of the programs they were in my childhood, it would be dishonest to frame that weekend like a true return to the past, but for that afternoon, the spirits of times long gone were again conjured. Folsom was invaded by all these red-clad morons, deliriously out of touch with the reality I had accepted; It was so easy to despise them, just like old times. The way the buffs stormed back in that game gave me shades of the '99 contest. Would we blow it? Nah. These weren't the same fuskers; if you get a good shot on them, say a 99-yard flea flicker out of your own endzone, they whimper and fade. It was a perfect weekend and a remarkable homecoming. I could hardly imagine a better game to introduce my partner to such a special part of my life. There was this incredible poetry to the way everything aligned; the '19 game rhymed with the joy I felt in 2001, as we kicked the nubs further down the pitiful hole we first pushed them down. I looked at my life. Girlfriend, career, family, connections to the past... It was all right where it belonged.
...And then it wasn't. Things started falling apart for me near the end of 2019, and the whirlwind of **** that was 2020 hit like an ineluctable gut punch. Tucker, who I swore was the guy, left the buffs like a total scumbag; my relationship, with the girl I swore was the one, fell apart; I lost my job; the world spiraled into a pandemic and continued doubling down into its political turmoil. I was not where I belonged; I was everywhere else. The world felt like it was ending. Football season started in... November?! All the positivity and regularity I felt in 2019 was a painful, devastating lie. With the buffs going through the loss of their coach in such an underhanded, untimely way, I assumed there was no way the buffs would be good . When I prepared to watch the 2020 buffs make their debut against UCLA, I told myself I would be happy simply for the chance to see the buffs play any football whatsoever.
I don't think I have ever cried from a CU loss, and I've experienced my share of beatdowns and gut-wrenchers. But as I watched in awe how the buffs built a thoroughly convincing lead over the first two quarters, and as I sat there, completely alone and quarantined in my room, and the buffs kept making play after play, I couldn’t help but let the tears run down my face. This was it-- a surging, precious reminder of home, when so many of us needed it most. The buffs held on for their victory, built upon it, and made the mini-season that was 2020 such a treat to watch. Things have been so overwhelmingly difficult, but the buffs are still here; Ralphie is still running.
So what is it, exactly, that overwhelms so many of us and drives our fandom? That draws us all in, in such a mesmerized way? It's not something arbitrary, as I once thought; not in the slightest. It is family, it is friendship, it is an ability to rise from defeat and the will to continue striving toward the victories, and to savor those victories, because in them we remember what it means to be together, in them we get to celebrate a chance to be alive and breathing. We are temporarily relieved from the constant burden of the inevitable losses we all will face-- losses that have seemed all too palpable in recent times. But that anxiety of loss, it drifts away when we are all together in one place, where we're supposed to be, basking in victory, appreciating the world we share all around us. Navigating it feels possible when we harness the energies of these moments. CU, as a football team, as a place, as a shared spirit, has given me so many of these moments.
Will college football still exist when I'm my dad's age? I don't know. It certainly will be very different than it is now. But this much is certain: it's beautiful to have experienced life's toughest lessons as a constant member of the CU community. Maybe it's strange, looking back on all of this so deeply. But I'm sure many of you here can relate. The Ralphie VI video really made me think about all this. I am so excited to share this college football season with all of you.
**** 'em up.
