On Saturday, I made the short trip to West Lafayette to cover the Notre Dame-Purdue football game with WVFI Radio. Two of my good student media friends joined me for a long day that started at 8 a.m. at Main Circle and wrapped up at 11:30 p.m. in Bookstore Lot. During the drive back to South Bend, one of my companions, a sophomore, asked me and the trip’s other member (both of us are juniors) an interesting question: did you enjoy freshman year or sophomore year more?
I already knew the answer. The opportunities that came with year two — to have experience, a car and an actual reputation with people I cared about — made it much more rewarding and thus more enjoyable to me in the grand scheme of things.
And yet, as I spent more miles on a random stretch of Indiana State Highway 25 racking my brain for the distant days of 2022-23, I realized something. I really don’t give freshman year enough credit.
I can’t necessarily blame myself for doing that. When you have just four guaranteed years to spend in a place you’ve always wanted to be, it’s easy to seek advancement as quickly as possible. If I was going to have the best college experience possible, I needed to make all the friends, lead all the clubs and cover all the games. Now, I’m closer to all three of those points but also aware that there’s something special about taking a step away from them. Before you can keep moving forward, you have to stop — heck, maybe even go back.
That brings me to this year. Three weeks in, I’ve covered both the Texas A&M and Purdue football games on the road with student radio, and they were — as you can probably imagine — very different. Texas A&M was the one I had spent the entire summer looking forward to, for many reasons. A primetime game in Week One. A trip that would require more planning and execution than any other in the regular season. I had high expectations. It had to be perfect.
Boy, it very nearly wasn’t. After traveling more than 1,000 miles on Friday, we arrived at the stadium on Saturday to find precisely zero inches of space reserved for our student radio broadcast. Our credential had essentially been approved and sent into the abyss. Two hours before kickoff, I was in panic mode. Fortunately, just in the nick of time, press box staff found a platform on the concourse for us to work from, and the night went just about as well as it could have in any circumstance.
Fast-forward two weeks to Saturday’s Purdue game, where those concerns were never apparent. We knew coming in that we would have a whole radio booth to ourselves. The stress of flights, rental cars and hotel stays whittled down to a simple two-hour drive from South Bend to West Lafayette. A 6 a.m. wakeup the morning after the game turned to a nice, Sunday morning sleep-in.
But did the game really offer all that much to look forward to? Notre Dame had already lost a game, Purdue had gone 4-8 the year prior and the matchup never could have created the same hype and atmosphere that the A&M game did. I carried maybe five percent of Week One’s lofty expectations into Week Three.
Funny enough, that’s what made Saturday so beautiful.
We started with a two-hour walk around Purdue’s campus, which turned out a lot more interesting than I had imagined. We learned some Boilermaker history, chuckled at the miniature locomotives chugging up and down the sidewalks and somehow developed an inside joke out of our excitement to see the Engineering Fountain. Once inside Ross-Ade Stadium, we ended up with no choice but to put our feet up and relax. The booth left for us was massive, the weather was phenomenal and the press box dining offerings were plentiful. Long before the Irish opener their can of whooping on Purdue, we were living right.
Then the game happened, we made a quick postgame jaunt to the field and left town belting out Garth Brooks with the windows down. The final two hours on the road we spent analyzing Notre Dame football, discussing college life and reliving the laughs we shared on air after realizing the Irish had scored more points against Purdue than they did against South Bend Howard Park in 1900. What, did they just show up to Howard Park one day and find an unassuming group of teenagers against whom they would run up the score?
After the despair that followed last week’s home opener, Saturday was just what the doctor ordered (or what the Chicago Dental Surgeons, another team Notre Dame crushed more than 100 years ago, ordered). No, it didn’t match the standards of the “ideal” college football gameday — one filled with maximum anticipation, pageantry and thrill. But, by way of plain and simple laughter and friendship, a wonderful day it was.
So as I return to the question that brought on my ramblings, I leave you with this answer. Living a non-stop life is awesome. And make no mistake, you sometimes need complete control of what you’re doing and planning to get where you want to go. But every once in a while, when the world awards you a chance, take your foot off the gas. Remove your expectations. Just let go and live.
You’ll love what you find.
