I was visiting my friends Katie and Chris in Ohio, and their TV was broken. This was obviously an issue, since such a big game wasn't streaming online from any station. Katie and Chris are fellow Spartans, so they also realized the dire straits of this dilemma. Apparently they'd been talking about getting a new TV anyway, so we decided to go to Best Buy, buy a new TV, and get it set up in time to watch the Spartans smash through the Wolverines to victory. No problem, right? Well...
At Best Buy, we encountered problem #1: Katie and Chris couldn't afford the TV they wanted. Well, technically they could afford it. They had the money. They just didn't have the money with them, and their credit cards didn't have enough balance to buy the $1,700 monstrosity with high def and all sorts of bells and whistles that would basically make us feel like we were sucked into the game. Best Buy wouldn't accept checks. Obviously I wanted them to have the TV, both because I'm a good friend and also I REALLY WANTED TO WATCH THE GAME, so I offered to put the charge on my card. After all, think of all of the rewards points! So Katie and Chris wrote me a check, and I put the TV on my card, which is where we encountered...
Problem #2: My card got declined. Twice. I started to panic for a minute, because really I should have had a large balance on my card. I couldn't think why it got declined. Now we had no way to buy the TV, and Pete at Best Buy felt sorry for us, but there wasn't much he could do. Suddenly Chris had an epiphany: "I know why you got declined!" he said, "It's because you're out of town and your card company suspects fraud!" Almost as if on cue, my phone pinged with an e-mail from Chase saying that they suspected my card may have been stolen. Hooray! A solution! So I called Chase, provided them with the answers to all of my security questions, and they told me I could go ahead and buy the TV. Success! Problems were over! Let's go home and watch State!
Problem #3: Chris had to set up the TV, which was quite complicated (see below). Katie and I ran out to get some lunch (Skyline Chili! I was more excited than Katie.) while we waited for Chris to work his techie magic. By the time the TV was set up, the first quarter of the game was almost over. Urrrrg! Finally, though, the TV was set up, and we were ready to watch the game.
Problem #4: AT&T Uverse wouldn't let us watch the game! Apparently Katie and Chris didn't have the appropriate cable plan to watch the game, and their usual plan of watching it through the ESPN app on their xbox wouldn't work for this game. Katie called AT&T customer service (always a treat), and that person definitely wasn't a Spartan because they were no help at all. They basically just told us, "You can't watch the game. #sorrynotsorry."
Problem #5: As I previously mentioned, nowhere in America was streaming the game online. Nowhere. We looked. Luckily, Katie's husband is a hacker extraordinaire, so he hacked into a British station that was playing the game! All of the commercials were for British products and advertised with British accents, but we didn't care. We could finally watch our beloved Spartans! Chris couldn't plug his computer into the new TV because he didn't have the right cords, so after all of our work and $1,700 spent on a TV we couldn't use, we were watching the game on a small computer with an extremely pixelated screen. But we were watching the game. I could live with this. I graded papers and drank a hard cider while watching my team. Fall had officially arrived.
Problem #6: The game was a very exciting, tense game, but after the third quarter Katie and Chris said we had to leave to go to a youth group event with their church. They were going to a haunted hayride. I didn't want to go to a haunted hayride; I wanted to watch the game, but the problem with staying with friends for the weekend is that you basically have to do what they want. For the forty minute drive to the house where we were eating pizza before the hayride, I obsessively updated my phone for score updates. I announced them periodically when something changed. I was glad to know what was going on, but I wished I was watching the game.
Solution #1: When we arrived at the youth group person's house for pizza, I was amazed. The house was huge and straight out of a magazine. I secretly think it's the Better Homes and Gardens headquarters. They probably have an office in the basement with all of the writers who periodically come upstairs to take pictures of the rooms for their spreads. My mouth dropped open when I saw the kitchen. The only thing that could possibly look more beautiful than the kitchen at that moment was when I walked into the living room and saw a huge, flat-screen, high-def television playing THE game! HOORAY!!!! For the first time that day, something went right! The only thing that could numb my joy was the fact that Michigan was winning, but at least I was there to watch. I tried to sneakily take pictures of their beautiful house without people thinking I was a creeper, but I was largely unsuccessful.
As the seconds ticked down, it looked like Michigan had clinched the victory. A few kids suggested maybe we should head over to the hayride, as the game was "practically over." Katie, Chris, and I asked if we could stay to watch the ending, because we stand by our team from kickoff until the final buzzer (well, except for all of the parts we missed due to the aforementioned problems, but really...we tried).
THEN. With TEN SECONDS left in the game, the most improbable thing I have ever seen in college football happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-kD_8QZM9k
We stared in open-mouth disbelief as the punter fumbled the ball right into our player's hands. We screamed at him to run as if he could hear us. We watched the buzzer hit zero, and we knew this one play was all we had. If he was tackled, if he was pushed out of bounds, if ANYTHING went wrong, the game was over and Michigan would win. Still, somehow, literally against all odds...he made it by inches into the endzone. The living room of the Better Homes and Gardens mansion erupted into screams. Even the youth group kids were excited, because what a crazy ending to a game! We hugged, we jumped, we spontaneously started singing the MSU fight song...it was awesome. I would have started jumping on the couch in happiness if that couch didn't probably cost more than my house.
All in all, it was quite the saga to try to watch the game, but the saga had a very happy ending because we got to watch the craziest ending in football history on a TV that showed that play in crystal clear detail. I felt like I was there, and it felt GOOD.
Go Green. Go White. Go State!
No comments:
Post a Comment