It's Saturday. It's Labor Day weekend. Change has come. The air just feels different. Maybe it's the barely contained excitement of the majority of the people I see and hear lately. Football season has officially begun. I'm in one of those places where that distinction matters. Down here, you are definitely the odd man out if you admit to not liking football. As for me and mine, we will be watching. I live and breathe for this stuff. However, my game doesn't start until tomorrow. I'm not sure why they scheduled a college game on a Sunday, but they did. I'm good with that. It left me available for an experience I never would have had otherwise.
I was invited to attend a Citadel game with a group of people that included two graduates from there. Of course I accepted! I would have been insane not to. I would have been happy enough just to be at any game, but to be there with people who could speak to the history of the place, especially one with such stories to tell, it made my day. I knew one of the couples, and the other who sat where I did was supremely friendly and funny. It was an incredible night. They made sure we stood in the perfect spot to watch the cadets march in. They took me down to see the bulldogs on the side of the field at the half, including the little brindle puppy girl who was insanely cute. They pointed out the song that the band played--when most bands would play the school fight song, the Citadel band played "Hey, Baby." It replaced "Dixie," which was phased out around the same time that the first female cadet was allowed to attend. When I asked, it was agreed that they probably play that particular song ("Hey, hey, hey, baby, I want to know if you'll be my girl"), for the same reason that all of the young women of college age were spectacularly dressed at the game. There were a lot of sweet young things determined to catch a cadet's eye.
The game surprised us all. It was expected that it would be a blowout, an easy win. That was not the case at all. The smaller school they played brought fewer players, and their guys kept dropping like flies, mostly with cramps in the heavy, humid, warm night. But they played hard, and ended up beating Citadel. I really didn't have a dog in this fight (pun intended), and I was happy just to listen to the announcer, and the bands, and the crowd. I took a lot of photos, and I'm about to break another one of my self-imposed rules again. There are going to be dozens of human faces in what I post. But I don't know a single one of them, so I'm not going to have a lot of guilt over it.
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