the game.

On Sunday we had the distinct pleasure of attending a professional ‘football’ game… now I don’t know why I thought that it would be like any other professional sports game I have been to in the past… I don’t know why I thought that I would be able to purchase refreshments, hotdogs, maybe some cotton candy. I don’t know why I thought that there would be a lot of music and cheering fans. I don’t know why I thought that we would sit in the seats printed on our tickets..

Needless to say, I encountered many surprises at this game. Now, this was a big game because it was the final game or something like that… and our team was playing one of the best teams in the league. So it was a big deal. When we got to the stadium uniformed military personnel surrounding the perimeter and a huge mass of people crowded outside the gates greeted us. We jumped into the mass and started pushing our way to the front. When we got to the front, military guys holding onto our shoulders physically forced us into a single-file line. Aubrey got through alright, but Steph and I were given weird looks, and through a lot of yelling and hand motions we realized we were at the wrong gate. Great. We have to go through all of THAT again. We went over to the next gate and just shoved ourselves in front of the mass and were immediately forced through these metal fences… no single-file lines this time, just good old cram-as-many-people-into-this-space-as-physically-possible.

We finally got through the cattle fences and got to our entrance door only to find another huge mass of people:

We jumped into this one feeling like pros, but we didn’t get very far. About a minute of pushing later, I watched as the mob knocked over the tiny metal detector that probably wasn’t doing anything to begin with and start rushing the door. The military guys couldn’t do anything against the mob that just wanted to watch the game… so they blew a bunch of whistles, called for back-up, and closed the huge metal doors to the entrance… which made all of us really angry. Steph and I joined in the yelling, but after a while I figured they weren’t going to open the doors anytime soon since the crowd wasn’t dying down and people were getting impatient. We pushed our way to freedom and saw a bunch of people running towards another entrance.. so we ran after them.. but the next 4 gates were also closed with huge mobs of people yelling outside of them…

We finally squeezed through entrance 16 before the doors closed and we were finally in the game! But then we had to hop 4 fences to get back to our section and find our seats. We found Kristin and Kathryn in the madness.. were stopped by a couple of police guys… but as Kathryn wisely put it, “Let’s just jump the fence, he doesn’t have anything to beat us with!” soooo yeah.
We made it to our seats and enjoyed the game and the longest lasting wave I have ever witnessed.





Oh, and we won… so of course people lit things on fire to celebrate ☺: