...and I am a Tar Heel

Last night I attended my first UNC vs. Duke Men's Basketball game, an experience that plenty of people can only wish to have, for free... sort of. Our chances of getting into were dismal and unrealistic, for all we knew, but we figured it was worth the try. Tickets were virtually impossible to come by as the three of us were only sophomores and the fourth a grad student at Tennessee. We had to wait in the standby line and pray that after all of the ticket holders took their seats their would be room to spare in our Carolina Blue stadium for a little under a hundred Tar Heels and a Volunteer. We waited in the literally freezing wether for two hours, resisting the violent wind slapping our faces as if there really were tar on our heels, it was actually just the biting chill reaching the subcutaneous layers of our feet.

After being led into the stadium the comforting warmth of the Dean Smith Center was quickly undermined by the frantic ascending and descending of stairs in search for four open seats. The disorganization of it all reminded me of that scene in the breakfast club when the kids ran through the hall while trying to avoid Mr. Vernon, we could have used the catchy 80's pop tune to calm our nerves. The seats we found, four rows from the back, smelled of stale cigarettes and were surrounded by what looked like the cast of Cocoon. What's better is that to our right sat a group wearing the wrong blue... worth every second.

I won't give the play by play. No doubt it wasn't a game for the history books, but we cheered, laughed, screamed and cursed for the next two hours as our Tar Heels fought the Battle of the Blues. We left disappointed because no matter how close our rebuilding year victory against Duke seemed it wasn't close enough. I was furious. I wanted to invent cuss words. I wanted to smoke till I threw up. Later we went back to my apartment where we smashed a pumpkin, that we for some reason had in our room, against the sidewalk. We felt a little better.

We watched Carolina play Duke in the Dean Dome the night they retired Tyler Hansbrough's jersey on a Rivalry Week Wednesday. We were in the stadium. It was a good night.