While most of the college football world has been counting down until the Alabama/LSU game, my wife and I can’t wait until it ends.
That is the price of being in a mixed marriage between an Alabama and an LSU fan.
My wife and I agree on a lot of things. We love each other, college football, a good bowl of gumbo and the New Orleans Saints, though not necessarily in that order.
This arrangement works well for us 364 days a year. But this Saturday, no matter who wins Alabama’s game against LSU on Saturday, we’re both going to end up feeling like losers.
The collateral damage this game brings our household on annual basis far outpaces the joy of victory either of us experiences for a win. Every year when our teams play, we sit silently on opposite sides of our couch, with competing sets of team-branded merchandise before us, rooting under our breath for our own team’s success and, by implication, the other’s demise.
It’s a miserable experience.
The joy of every on-filed success is dulled by the realization that every positive emotion a good play brings is balanced by an equally negative emotion from the other half of my household.
We cheer in muted breaths for fear that if one of us oversteps into what could be construed as taunting, our marital acrimony will last beyond the end of the game. As it often does.
Watching this game is torture on an average year. This season, when the winner of this game becomes the presumptive national champion and the loser is reduced to playing out the string while hoping for a miracle, there may be more tension on our couch Saturday night than in the entirety of Bryant-Denny Stadium.
I can’t imagine how the loser will manage to survive.
Not to mention our marriage.
Born in Mobile, I’ve been an Alabama fan since I was old enough to watch football. I went to college there largely for the purpose of getting discount student tickets.
Saturday isn’t just a game to me. Alabama may have won a National Title two years ago, but the bitterness from heavy-handed NCAA sanctions and our programs struggles still lingers among Alabama fans, especially in light of Auburn’s NCAA-loophole-fueled title run that we Alabama fans know the NCAA would have never let us to get away with.
We need one more national title to clear the bad taste out of our mouths, and our window might close after this year. Nick Saban, in his fifth year at Alabama, turned 60 Monday, and only one coach (Mack Brown) has ever won a BCS title more than five years into a tenure as head coach at the winning school. We need this game.
Of course, none of this matters to my wife. She just wants another national title and readily points out that she’s due because my team has won one since hers has.
My wife is from New Orleans, and one of the reasons I married her was her intense football devotion. I’m the envy of all my friends most weekends, when they spend their Saturdays completing honey-do lists while my wife is perfectly happy to schedule our lives around important games.
But this weekend, her passion turns against me.
Once the game starts, we will take turns arguing as to which one of us has the more depressing daily life, and is thus more deserving of a Karmic victory from the Cosmic football forces. We will accuse the other of cheering too loudly, and then feel guilty that they don’t feel free to cheer with a full heart. We will make lame rationalizations about how a loss in this game won’t hurt the other’s team irrevocably, even if it clearly will.
Our friends think our situation is funny. To them, whether a marriage can survive this Saturday’s College Football Armageddon is as interesting of a question as who will win the game itself.
People we haven’t seen in months keep emailing us, asking if they can come over and watch the game at our house for the novelty value, observing our reactions as though we were an elephant and tiger at the zoo.
We have, of course, turned down these offers. I am not sure life will go on for the loser of this game, and we can’t allow anyone we care about to witness the scene.
When the game ends, one of us will initially be on Cloud Nine, but that feeling will immediately dissolve upon seeing the other moping around, with dreams dashed until next season.
The friends and family of the winner will call to celebrate and my wife or I will have to walk the delicate balance of showing appropriate enthusiasm while not yelling so loudly as to rub the loser’s nose in defeat. It’s hell for the loser, and, frankly not very much fun for the winner either.
The game’s only solace is that it is scheduled at night, so the loser can go directly to bed Saturday night when it ends.
And then we can wake up Sunday and look to the Saints to bridge our differences.
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