The Day I Fell In Love

Sammys punt return! One of my favorite Beaver play off all time. What a great day
that was. For me, probably my second favorite non civil war game behind Quizzes
freshman coming out party against SC.

What a great day.

One of my vivid memories of that day was seeing a trojan fan, tailgating pre-game, dangling a small stuffed Beaver from a make-shift fishing pole. I mentioned to him that this was in poor taste, being that he was on Beaver turf and all. He scoffed at me, and mentioned something about the Beavers being lucky to even share the same field as the mighty men of troy. I'll admit I didn't have enough beer in me at the time to put up much of an argument other than meekly saying "Yeah, we'll see about that."

Needless to say, the Giant Killers II showed up that day, and as luck would have it I crossed paths with the u$c fan post-game. I Thanked him for providing some karma that may have helped propel the Beavers to victory but he was pretty much speechless, he just shook his head and muttered something under his breath.

The next week at the Salem Beaver Huddle I met the father of Jeff Van Orsow, the Beavs DE that knocked down the the trojan 2 point conversion pass that sealed the win. It was pretty cool to Thank him for his son being a Beaver and helping OSU to victory, Mr. Van Orsow was a great guy.

Hard to believe this happened 9 years ago, Thanks for sharing your "Anniversary"!

On the way out the door to that game, I paused to run back in to make sure the DVR was set. "Why are you doing that?" my wife said. "You know they're going to get killed." My wife is not a Beaver.

We won, and I didn't DVR another game for seven years, until our kid started playing soccer and DVRing became a necessity.

I remember being bitter because I was stuck up in the Valley View seating with my dad for Father's Weekend. It was great to be able to watch the game with him and experience that together, but painful to watch my fellow students rush the field in glory from way up there. Luckily I had my chance to do so later that year for the Civil War and an even more epic win against USC in 2008.