Magnificent post you've got me by 6 years, but we had the opportunity to see the football program with Ben be relevant, the basketball team with Vinnie Cohen, Manny Breland , and Jim Brown was good. We saw the down periods, but the upswings always came, and made being a fan worthwhile. The key as we age is to not get to high or to low, but the times when both programs are good is great. When you look at the great basketball and football programs over the past 60 years, we are one of the few that have been good in both.I turn 72 in a few months; please indulge me in a few memories and a little philosophical musings.
It is clear to me that the NCAA tournaments I have in front of me are far fewer than the ones I have seen in the past. Thus, I feel that being a fan, I have learned, is highly subjective and, in my case, age dependent. In the old days, I was passionate about the ebbs and flows of Syracuse basketball and football to the point where, when I was a junior in high school, I decked a Boston College fan standing in front of me in Archbold Stadium for screaming that Jim Brown was a dumb ni_ _ _ er; it was caught on national television. Once when I was a kid I pounded the radio (one of those plastic jobs shaped like Nash Rambler) so hard while listening to an away football game I broke the thing in half, vacuum tubes broken all over my bed; later, I usually got depressed or knee-walking drunk when the basketball or football team lost. I listened on my handheld shortwave radio to the Syracuse-Indiana 1987 final on the rooftop of the apartment building where I was living in Barcelona, Spain. I lost the signal with about two minutes to go and had to wait until the next morning to buy the International Herald Tribune to find out the Cuse had lost. I was disconsolate for days.
These days, I seem to savor each game as it comes. Last night's victory over the California Bears, though not the prettiest exhibition of a tournament game, was a sweet experience for me. Sure, I get mad at our guys when they pull a bone-headed move, but I always try to remember that they are playing for my team and thus offer encouragement rather than condemnation. I haven't lived in Syracuse for over 40 years, but, in many ways, I've never left the city with two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July. It will always be my town and my team; my blood leans toward Syracuse and its people and to the university for which I've rooted since I was a boy and from which I graduated. I've recruited fans from Mexico to Dubai and many places in between. My caveat is that once SU is eliminated (if they don't win it all), I lose all interest in the tournament. I don't stay up all night (like I do here, when the games are on the internet in the middle of the night) to watch teams I don't care about, nor can bear to see. It is the Cuse that has my heart. Always has. And always will.