A Visit to a Magical Place

"Mistakes were made." This was a common refrain during SGB's junket this weekend to a different and better world: Austin, TX. It's a world where the National Beer of Texas sometimes costs a buck. It's a world where you can't help but fall into a food coma at places like The Salt Lick. It's a world where a strip club sponsors a free tailgating party and the students are hotter than the strippers. It's a world where the number-one team in college football turns a contender into a pretender. Even high school football fans are so gung-ho that they wear their old varsity band jackets a decade and a half after they graduated.

It's not that it was a mistake to visit Austin; it was a mistake not to have gone there earlier and more often. For SGB staffers who went to small Northeastern schools, the difference between UT campus life and our college experiences is like the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing a bullet. We hit bars and restaurants that kept raising the bar, so to speak. We saw dozens of students camped out at 3:30AM waiting for ESPN College Gameday to dawn. And we were a few of 98,000 fans screaming our support for UT over Missouri, even though the Longhorns didn't need our help. Texas' 56-31 win over Mizzou wasn't even that close and quarterback Colt McCoy completed a ridiculous 91% of his passes. UT strengthened its hold on the top ranking in a place that feels like the center of the universe.

As great as the Austin trip was, it's still nice to return to Seattle, a place that orbits in the same firmament of cool cities as Texas' capital. But of course we come back to a sporting scene as bleak as our October skies. It's even more disheartening because it didn't used to be this way, at least on the collegiate level. At halftime of UW's loss to Oregon State, Washington honored its 1978 Rose Bowl team, reminding fans of better days. During the Don James era, UW probably looked a lot like UT does now, minus the beautiful weather and even more beautiful coeds. Now the Huskies are 0-6 and the vultures circling over Ty Willingham's head are flying lower every week.

It's easy to forget how much excitement and pride a winning team brings to your town when you experience nothing but losing -- losing games and losing teams -- like Seattle has recently. Of course Texas will always have more rabid football fans than the Northwest. But if or when UW returns to gridiron prominence, think how much support the team will get from the school and community, even though it's not the only game in town. It would, however, be the only winning game in town.

Austin probably feels different when the Longhorns aren't winning, although I don't know when that would be. Seattle's self-worth isn't as tied into the performance of its teams as other places, but it's easy to de-emphasize sports when you're losing. We can pretend we don't care, but we're really just trying to control our anger. Yes, mistakes were made, but at least some of them can be undone.