BRIC-A-BRAC: Hook 'Em

Shaking.

The good kind of shaking. Awesome rollercoaster. First kiss. Won the lottery. That kind.

My friend Holly was shaking. Her text message read, "I'm so excited I'm shaking."

Bill Simmons, my favorite online sports columnist was shaking. In his running diary, he wrote, "I'm shaking and I don't even have money on this game."

Oh, and I was shaking. Finally, desperate to release the energy, I yelped so loud that my wife woke up, thinking I had set myself on fire. No, really. "I thought you burned yourself," she said.

We're all talking about a college football game, and the fact that I'm even in on the conversation is downright astonishing.

The game in question is last night's Rose Bowl, which featured top-ranked Southern California taking on my alma mater, Texas, in a game to decide the college football national championship. Normally, I couldn't care less about the college football national championship, but Texas being in contention is such a rare event that even I was compelled to sit up and take notice.

I'm not a fan of college football. I've only ever attended two contests of the Texas Longhorns: once before I went to school there, and once after. Whilst I was matriculating, I avoided it like the plague.

Why? Let's just go ahead and call it snobbery. I was happy to attend basketball games or baseball games. I even served proudly as a play-by-play commentator for the champion women's volleyball team. (Tesa Brown and I may not have been the A team, but when the time came clinch the conference title, we were there.) But the football always put me off, and I think it was the football fans. Students are notoriously obnoxious, and proud of it. They lined up in the wee hours for every contest. They bought tasteless T-shirts with a copyright-infringing Calvin relieving himself on whoever that week's opponent was. They enthusiastically waved the banner of conformity, and I hated every bit of it. So I stayed away.

But there's a peculiar loyalty that comes with attending college. No matter that I'm 1200 miles from campus, I'm still hoping for my school to fare well. More than a professional team, which hires the best people it can find and will gladly pull up stakes if greener pastures lie elsewhere, a school's team is inextricably linked to its location. The players are walking the same grounds you did. They're getting the same diploma you got. (In theory.) I was never part of the Chicago White Sox. But I was definitely part of the Texas Longhorns. With them, I get to yell "We Won!", and it's not entirely false.

Strangely for a school that instructs about 48,000 people at any given time, Texas has a bit of an underdog status. When it comes to football, they haven't won a championship in my lifetime. They usually get stuck going to some crappy bowl game like the Freedom Bowl. Which they lose. And they have a knack of losing the really important games. The best showing the Longhorns managed during my time there was a 10-1 record, a conference title and a berth in the Cotton Bowl opposite Miami. They proceeded to cough up the game right from the opening kickoff, eventually losing by a score of something like 51-3. It was disheartening.

Something funny happened last year, though, when Texas managed to snag an invitation to the Rose Bowl to play Michigan (despite the fact that California probably deserved to go instead). I watched the game in snippets, and everytime I tuned in, the Horns managed to cough up the lead. It all came down to the very end, when Jordan Klepper and I were staring through a bar window before a show, and I was on pins and needles wondering if we might actually pull this out. When we finally emerged victorious, Jordan just shook his head at me. "You don't understand," I said. "We never win this game."

Given that track record, I guess it was inevitable that the Longhorns would garner very little respect going into the title game. USC was looking to repeat at champion (some would say three-peat, which would be clever if it weren't for a little thing called LSU in 2004), and pundits were debating the Trojans' place among the greatest teams of all-time. I suppose it was easy to forget that there was still the actual game to be played before the coronation.

In classic Texas fashion, it was a brutal game to watch. USC took the lead, then Texas got on the board, and then scored two more times in rapid succession. A missed extra point, a missed field goal, constant fumbling...all adding to the agony. Plus, I got to see the Trojans' star rusher Reggie Bush for the first time. The man just plowed through the defensive line. By the middle of the fourth quarter, with Texas down by 12, I was pretty close to despair. I wanted Texas to win. I wanted everyone else to be wrong about USC. And I was not going to get my wish.

But all along, there was Vince Young.

In any great game, no matter the sport, there always seems to come a moment when somebody steps forward and says, "Screw it. I'll do this myself." In the 1991 World Series, Kirby Puckett locked up his spot in the Hall of Fame when he told his fellow Twins, "Hop on my back. I'm taking you to the promised land."

There's no doubt: this is what Vince Young said. He threw and almost never missed. He ran and the defense could do nothing to stop him. He would end up with 265 yards passing and 200 yards rushing. He was going to do it all, and he certainly wasn't going to let one of the greatest teams in the history of the game stand in his way. It was truly an awesome sight. I'm getting a shiver just thinking about it.

With 15 yards, four downs, a minute and a half, and five points to go, it all came down to Vince Young. And as he threw away the first three downs, I got to that moment that you so rarely experience as a sports fan, where you actually believe that the outcome of the next few seconds will determine whether you live or die. It's an excruciating, exhilirating feeling. This was my alma mater, my school, a part of my identity, and it was inches away from greatness. Holly and Bill Simmons and me, we were shaking because we were living a moment on the edge of a knife.

So of course I yelped when Vince Young decided to keep the ball himself and ran in for the touchdown. In an instant, everything went right. A "holy crap" moment if there ever was one.

This doesn't make me into a college football fan or anything. We'll be back in the Holiday Bowl or something in a few years. And I still think these huge throngs of fans marching in lockstep are just plain scary. (I'm looking at you, Notre Dame.) But I am going to savor this moment for a while. It was a great sports moment. It was a great Texas moment. And it was a moment made for shaking.

Hook 'em.