I went to Virginia Tech for a year after graduating from high school. In Blacksburg, I attended exciting Hokie football games and fell in love with college athletics during my impressionable freshman year. At the end of the year, though, I decided to transfer to U.Va., where I picked up journalism and immersed myself in Wahoo sports culture.
I’ve been asked several times which school it is, then, that I hold closest to my heart. What university can make me swoon just at the sound of its fight song? If I bought bed sheets decorated with the insignia of a college, which would I pick? The answer surprises a lot of people.
The University of Notre Dame.
“Cheer, cheer for Old Notre Dame,
Wake up the echoes cheering her name,
Send a volley, cheer on high,
Shake down the thunder from the sky.”
I’ve been raised as a fan of the Fighting Irish since birth. It’s in my blood. Both of my parents graduated from Notre Dame, and you’d have trouble finding a room in our house in Ashburn, Va. that doesn’t have blue and gold in it.
It’s more, however, than just my upbringing that keeps me longing for a road trip to South Bend on a Saturday during football season. There’s something mythical and beautiful about Notre Dame. Virginia has Al Groh in a blue blazer and orange tie. The Hokies have a lunch pail. Notre Dame has “Win one for the Gipper,” Touchdown Jesus and helmets painted with real, 24-karat gold.
I visited the campus for the first time a few years ago and it was picturesque. If you think the movie “Rudy” over-sentimentalizes the place, you’re wrong. The Grotto really looks that hauntingly beautiful at sunset, the Golden Dome truly glimmers that brightly and the lakeside path between the dorms and classes is actually that stunning.
A lot of sports fans and writers like to criticize fans of the Irish as pretentious and self-centered, and the teams themselves as over-hyped. A lot of this criticism is justified; Notre Dame, the one football team with an independent national television contract, lately has been decidedly mediocre, and yet the fans still hold the school in a nearly religious esteem.
This is part of the reason I love Notre Dame so much, though. It has the most devoted following in the world. Did you know that fans who try to leave home football games early get booed? Can you imagine that in Scott Stadium?
As overblown and old-fashioned as some of it sounds, it all comes across as remarkably classy and magical once you experience it. Every week, the Fighting Irish marching band learns its opponent’s fight song, then thanks the opposing team for visiting by playing it, no matter the final score.
Every student who attends the game — which is almost every one, by the way — stays long past the clock ticking to zero to sing and sway along to the alma mater. Remind you of anything? The difference between that and the Good Ol’ Song is that, even after a big home win, 85 percent of the Virginia student section empties before the band can even take the field.
Suffice to say, I hold Notre Dame athletics, especially football, in very high regard. Strange as it seems, though, this is the very reason I decided not to attend the school.
I didn’t want to ruin my romantic image of the school. I knew I’d grow as bitter as the Indiana winter winds whenever the temperature fell into the negatives. Those landmarks I grew up idolizing would become routine if I saw them every day, and I couldn’t bear the thought.
I know in my heart of hearts that, as much as I dream of walking on the same ground that Knute Rockne tread, as much as I’d love hearing dramatic re-tellings of the Joe Montana chicken soup comeback more times than I could count, Notre Dame isn’t the college for me. I belong at Virginia.
The University of Notre Dame works best for me as a legend. The stories of how my dad bumped into football star Allen Pinkett’s lunch tray and knocked food all over Pinkett, how he stormed the court after Notre Dame upset a then-undefeated, Ralph Sampson-led No. 1 Virginia basketball team and lost his favorite hat in the ensuing commotion, how he met and fell in love with my mother, are his own stories. I need to make my own stories and write my own legacy, which is exactly what I’m doing with all of you at this very moment.
Notre Dame always will be the school I grew up dreaming about but deliberately turned away from to preserve my image of it. I need to develop my own identity, and I’m happy with that.
Then again, there’s always grad school.
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