Friday night games meant a great deal for the morale of the school. I mean that in a positive way. More than anything, because we were football enthralled, we took time to figure it out and if someone beat us - rare - but it happened once or twice a year, we figured out that either they had a better line, better backs, whatever, and were reasonable about it.
When I ended up at MSU it was the same way just more so. Sure there were recruiting issues and Bubba Smith in his shiny white Oldsmobile that were pretty hard to reconcile. Over that backdrop was the Viet Nam war that put two different worlds on one campus - the I'm in college world and the I'm going to die world.
Saturdays in the fall then became something of a refuge - a place - an event that was other worldly. It was a Bullwinkle throwback on the "wayback machine". I was in the band for undergrad but in my grad year, we wore jackets and ties, shined shoes, the women wore dresses and heels (no kidding). It was an event for many of us - a social statement. When the Alma Mater was played, everyone stood and sang their hearts out and there wasn't a dry eye in the place.
When I hear the alma mater to this day, I choke up and I don't shy from it. Nor do I think any of my friends and classmates from that time do either. It isn't corny or childish. It means searching out the MSU football network on a Saturday afternoon, thinking back to that stadium in Columbus with 90,000 of these folks feeling the same way, traffic coming to a halt - life, on a certain level, coming to a halt and wishing, beyond reason, that I/we were there, In the Pines, At the Tunnel, on Landon Field, in the student section, blazers on, stadium blankets in hand, realizing that high school stuff was just that, not unimportant but we being now so removed from wins and losses - just building the memories that are the tracks under our life's locomotive.