A moment to share and to savor a rare victory

The following was submitted by The View staff reporter Jerry LaVaute:

The phone call came just before midnight on Saturday. At that time of night, I was pretty sure who it was.

A phone call at that time of night sometimes doesn’t bode well, but I was looking forward to it.
In fact, I was planning to call him in a moment, but he beat me to it.

It was my son Matthew, who was calling from a bar. There was a lot of noise in the background, and the conversation was brief.

Did you see the game? he asked, referring to Notre Dame’s defeat of the University of Southern California in football a few moments earlier, on Saturday night.

I sure did, I replied. Wasn’t it great?

We agreed it was a great win, an unusual win, and he and I, who have now made the pilgrimage many times to ND’s home in South Bend, with and without family, have celebrated glorious victories over formidable gridiron opponents, and commiserated over crushing defeats – the defeats outnumbering the victories lately – making Saturday’s win all the sweeter.

Notre Dame football fans have learned to savor their football victories, because it’s been slim pickins’ now for about 15 years.

ND has had a tough season – new coach, new program, lost four key starting players – quarterback, running back, tight end, nose tackle – and three tough last-minute losses, two of them to the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

There’s a brief moment in an episode of the television show “Seinfeld” where someone runs up to Jerry, and shouts triumphantly after watching a game, “We won!”

“No,” Jerry says, “They won. You watched.”

I use this parable as a frequent reminder to myself of the futility of being a sports fan.

It had been nine years since Notre Dame had beaten USC – they had lost eight times in a row.

My wife was surprised to see me so upbeat after the victory: after all, USC is a school out on the west coast, not a regional rival like U-M or MSU.

There were three reasons for my elation:
· Notre Dame and USC is the oldest intersectional football rivalry in the country. Knute Rockne came up with the idea of the contest in the 1920s, when he was working hard to develop a national reputation for the small Catholic school in the Midwest. He went to the east coast to play Army, and to the west coast to play USC.
· Although the ND football program had fallen on lean years, none of their rivals had beaten them eight consecutive times, and often by wide point margins. For many of those eight years of losses, ND was not even competitive.
· If you’re measuring your worth as a college football team, the measuring stick for me must include teams in the south and the west. Teams in the Midwest may win an occasional championship, but football excellence (not academic excellence, sadly), belongs primarily to those teams.

There was a lot of good and bad luck involved in the victory. ND’s quarterback, an 18-year-old freshman who was starting for just the third time, turned the ball over to USC four times.
On the game-winning drive downfield, the ND running back lost the ball, but, amidst several USC Trojans in hot pursuit, it was recovered by ND’s tight end.

A USC receiver dropped what would likely have been for USC a game-winning touchdown pass, all alone at the 15-yard line. The ND defender had slipped and fallen in a steady downpour that began in the second half.

I have the game saved permanently on my TiVo. I watched it in its entirely on Sunday morning, having missed some of the game the night before.

I may never watch the game again. But I remember clearly the feeling on Saturday, made better by sharing it with other ND fans late that night – my wife at my side, and my son by a quick, thoughtful phone call – football fan joy, often elusive, is much sweeter when it can be savored with others.