As they always say, the road trip the burns twice as bright lasts half as long. We came to this realization sitting in a Boston Chipotle listing the things people me and my three friends hated about our lives: we were all tired as hell on about four hours of sleep, as were our feet from standing for about three hours and walking about a mile to and fro where we parked. I didn't have a hangover anymore, but my brain distinctly hurt. I had the early indicators of what would turn out to be a pretty decent sunburn. We all decided to drive back to New York despite having been in Boston for less than eight hours rather than show up at the MIT or BU chapter of our fraternity to nap and not talk to anybody while they presumablydrank, fall asleep in a car or public park, or, even worse, continue being awake. None of us wanted anything to do with drinking. I no longer wanted to go to my friends' friends party. Boston, after all, sucks.
Despite all the general malaise, we all agreed the trip was pretty damn awesome. Such is life when NU wins.
- Advice to you would-be roadtrippers: don't drink the night before you know you'll have to start driving at 4:30 a.m. I say this for two reasons: one, you know it will be a living hell. Two, it inevitably devolves into a game of "who can drink the most and sleep the least and therefore be the least capable of driving at 4:30 a.m.", a game which literally everybody loses. Luckily, one of us was smart and withheld, meaning no DUI-ing went down. Although there was a lot of sitting in silence and asking for the radio to be turned down and wearing sunglasses despite near complete darkness on the I-95 at five on a Saturday morning.
- Eventually we got to Boston. BC's campus is pretty damn beautiful, featuring old-timey churchish buildings on some hills with a pretty lake in the middle. However, this lake is nowhere near as big as Northwestern's lake, and therefore, the school sucks. A BC girl told us to "go back to our landlocked state", which is a pretty lame insult. But it really led right into us mocking their crappy excuse for a lake. I'd call it a pond if you asked me. Should've ponded the posts.
- I always forget that for all the jokes I make about Boston... people actually talk with those accents. This became an issue when we tried to find out how far parking was from people. No... no... how FAR. Not fah. Far. With an R.
- I spent most of Friday night quoting that one Mark Wahlberg scene in the beginning of The Departed where he yells at Leonardo DiCaprio, "I know what you are and I know what you're not, and you are not a cop. You got a 1400 on your SAT's, you lace-curtain motherfucker, you're an astronaut, kid, not a statie. You can be anything in this world in five years, but I can guarantee you you will not be a Massachusetts State Trooper." This became funny when BC's campus was overrun with actual Massachusetts State Troopers, and the hypothetical situation arose wherein they asked me to do something and I viciously told them that they weren't a cop and that they could be anything in this world in five years but not a Massachusetts State Troopah, those lace-curtain motherfuckers. I'm genuinely surprised this didn't happen and that I'm not in jail.
- Our first stop was a bar in Cleveland Circle called Cityside, where we went because it was a bar. What I did not know is that at 9 a.m., this place would be top-to-bottom packed with Northwestern fans. Had to have been 100 purple shirts and maybe five BC fans. I found this deeply confusing and awesome.
- We headed over to BC campus with our cube and our NU shirts. Their tailgate setup is pretty alright: the area around the stadium is filled with
pahkingparking for us to act like idiots in. We headed over to meet someone's friend in senior student housing, which is a bunch of summer sleepaway camp-esque cabins behind a gate that you have to be 21 to enter, behind which was pretty much the entire senior body of BC getting ready for gameday, cornhole and all. I kinda like this setup. However, this is also not a good place to be if you're a fan of the opposing team. We got heckled pretty hard. Our friend stayed with his friend in there but we headed back outside to drink with people that wouldn't yell at us. - Something really disturbing is the fact that every BC student receives the same exact t-shirt during orientation, proclaiming themselves a "SuperFan". It's a pretty ugly color of bright gold, and every one of them wears it to every football game. I mean, it gets the job done of filling up the student section in the same exact color, but, I have like eight purple shirts. I love football and school spirit and all, but if I had to do laundry more than once a month or so in order to support my team, I'd be furious. (YES, I HAVE THAT MANY PAIRS OF BOXERS.)
- Feeling like a new man, we made our way into the game after BC had put up three points. Our tickets were somewhere someplace high. Instead we just decided to go sit in the middle of the Northwestern section. Instead of that, we sat in the only place there was free space in the Northwestern section, the second row.
- Those are not my assigned seats, but it is where I sat. The NU section was loud, proud, and pretty big. I'd estimate 3-4,000 of us. A bummer not to have the band, but we still had our fair share of "Go U"'s, "Hey Baby"'s, sang the fight song with vocal interludes where the band should be, and got damn rowdy when needs be. Adonis Smith scored his touchdown running right at our end zone, that was unspeakably awesome, as is the clip from the broadcast on ESPN. It's genuinely impressive how many fans NU can get to road games in a different time zone considering maybe 25,000 will be in Ryan Field on Saturday.
- TAKE NOTE, NORTHWESTERN'S BAND: BC played "All of the Lights" and "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie. Yup.
- That said, they also played "Shippin' Up to Boston", which, you know, sucks.
- I don't know much about cheerleading, but I can say hands down that Boston College's are not good. I witnessed a lot of falling down and at least two cheerleaders suffering injuries.
- There were about four million nicknames for Kain Colter thrown around at some point. I like the Hurrikain, though. And Coltergeist. And House of Kain.
- Along those lines, I'm not letting anybody take "Teach Me How To Trumpy" away from me.
- BC's announcer had the ever so slightest of Boston accents. Coltah the ball-carriah for fouah yahds. Tackle by Brian Petahs.
- Drinking in the morning despite my hangover meant I had a slight headache towards the end of the game. Nothing has ever been worse than when after BC scored its second touchdown to cut the lead to seven, BC's PA Announcer played a 700-DECIBLE SOUND OF AN EAGLE SCREECHING IN A HIGH PITCH FOR NINE SECONDS STRAIGHT. I love America, but if you'd given me a gun, I would've shot a bald eagle at that moment in time if you told me it meant I'd never hear that noise again.
- Of all the things you can play on your scoreboard, a video about the excitement of ACC football is not one of the best. DUKE AND WAKE FOREST ARE STILL BATTLING IT OUT FOR THE COASTAL DIVISION OR MAYBE ATLANTIC DIVISION TITLE!
- I tried to get an N-I-T chant going. No go. "Just Like Basketball" is too clunky for my tastes.
- In the third quarter a cameraman swung by to film us for ESPN's broadcast of the game going crazy in the fan section. Immediately after, my friend was like "man, I just got four texts saying I was just on TV!" I felt left out. I hadn't gotten any texts about being on TV. Why did nobody like me? Is everybody watching better friends with my friend than they are with me? Then I watched ESPN3 for my recap post and saw that the camera literally cut off just to the right of my friends' head. I am furious at ESPN's cameraman for getting me to think I was acting rowdy on camera without actually filming me and I hope bad things happen to him. This all shields me from the fact that I might not have gotten any texts had I been on TV, either.
- There's not much cooler than seeing the team sprinting over to the visiting section on the road to sing the fight song with you. Nutso. Unfortunately for the team, there were two sections, so they had to make a stop at each side of the field, but it was worth it.
- I only got, like two comments about my Yankees hat. Boston really does suck.
- The rest of the trip was being completely exhausted and talking about how much Boston is the worst. This is the end.