Notre Dame Nostalgia

I've been back to Notre Dame 14 times since I graduated.  Every single time I was back was for football weekend in the fall, with one exception.  I went back for the Blue-Gold Game and a Cubs game in April of 2009.  And I do love Notre Dame football, but that certainly wasn't the only thing I love about Notre Dame.  So this weekend was the first time I was back for anything other than football.  This was also my first trip back in more than a year (since the Stanford game in 2014), which is the longest I've gone without being on campus since I graduated.

During that April 2009 trip, I also went to a Notre Dame baseball game that weekend to see Golden Tate play.  I think that was the only Notre Dame baseball game I've been to.  I was trying to think of how many basketball games I went to as a student and it wasn't many.  I'm pretty sure that the only games I went to my first semester were a win against Rutgers at home and then a loss to Rutgers at Madison Square Garden in the Big East Tournament (when a win might have gotten us into the tournament).  The next year, the only games I remember going to were against Georgetown and Villanova.  I might have gone to one or two others (and I think I went to a women's game or two with Tim).  But for those games against Georgetown and Villanova, we got there really early and got into the first row of the student section.  We lost to Georgetown by three in double overtime.  Villanova was ranked number 6 and it was looking good for us.  I remember they cleared stuff out in front of the student section because they were preparing for us to rush the court.  It was tied and then Kyle Lowrie tipped in the game-winner with 1.7 seconds left.  On ESPN.com, there was a picture where you could clearly see me in the background.  And one of the Chicago newspapers put a picture from the end of the game on the cover of the sports section where you could very clearly see all of my friends in the front row and then I was cut off.  I'm pretty sure I didn't go to any basketball games my final semester.  I was not too enthusiastic about basketball after the two previous seasons and our non-conference home games probably weren't too exciting anyway.  I went to a few hockey games.  I think my last one was the night before my last football game as a student (the game Kyle played in).  We beat Michigan State 4-1 that night.  I remember wanting football to be my last sporting event as a student so I didn't go to any games my last month as a student.

I first arrived on campus as a student in January 2005.  It had snowed the day before I arrived.  The students were still a day away from returning for the spring semester.  I remember just walking around campus and looking at everything in the freshly fallen snow and thinking how great it looked.  I also remember how it just snowed all the time that winter.  When it wasn't snowing, it started snowing.  Usually the snow wasn't too heavy, but it was a constant presence.  It's all part of Notre Dame.  It was also cold.  There was one weekend in 2006 when it was so cold that I'm pretty sure I left the dorm once per day to get something to eat and that was it (I could go to mass in the dorm, so I didn't have to worry about leaving for that).  So it was appropriate that the high on Saturday for my first non-football trip back to campus was 13 degrees and it was snowing.  I actually thoroughly enjoyed it.  This coming weekend it's supposed to be 57.  I'm glad I went went it was cold and snowy.  It reminded me of my time as a student.  If it had been warm, it wouldn't have felt right for the winter.

So anyway, I flew in on Friday night.  I stayed at the O'Hare Airport Hilton and then took the bus early the next morning.  On Saturday night I was staying at the Inn at St. Mary's.  After dropping off my stuff, I headed to campus around 1:00.  I decided to walk and it was cold, but it didn't bother me (when I'm home, I hate anything below 30 degrees, but I was good). My first stop was the Grotto.  It's pretty much the first thing you come to when you're walking from St. Mary's, but I'm glad that was my first stop.  It looked gorgeous with the snow.  I stopped, lit a candle, and said some prayers.  I spent a good amount of time there when I was a student.  When you go for football, the Grotto is always so crowded.  That's why I would try to stop by early on Sunday morning when I would stay with Jon when he was in law school.  It was nice to be there again with just a few other people.

First stop

Next up was my old home, St. Edward's Hall.  I'm pretty sure I hadn't been inside since I last stayed with Jon when he was an AR there in 2013.  It's been renovated since then.  The lounge looked very different.  It looked nice, but the furniture is already beaten up. And there should really just be two recliners there permanently in honor of Jon and me.  I walked around for a little bit.  The old place looked good.  I went up to the fourth floor where I lived during my entire time there.  There was my first semester with Kyle when we had a quad that was pretty much a glorified double because Dan and Jorge were very rarely there.  They almost never slept there (I could probably count on one hand the number of times that all four of us were asleep in our beds at the same time).  And then at the end of the semester Dan got kicked out for a keg party (not that it really changed much since he was never there anyway).  My favorite memory from living there was when Kyle, Jorge, and I stole cable in the middle of the night.  We got a cable splitter and laid a cable from the fourth floor lounge to our room.  We did it in the middle of the night as if that was going to keep people from noticing.  We had to disconnect it after a week, but we did have it for St. Patrick's Day 2005, which was the greatest random Thursday in the history of sports.  My next year I lived in a glorified single because my roommate was a football player that probably spent 10-20 nights there the whole year.  And I was with Nick my final semester.  I was really the honorary fifth roommate with Jon, Dennis, Wilhelm, and Chris that semester.  The best story from living with Nick was very unfortunate for him.  His bed was the victim of some drunken freshman shenanigans one night that he wasn't in the room.  I'm not going into details, but that probably made it sound even worse than it was.  Before leaving, I checked out some pictures of all the guys from the dorm each year that were on the wall on the first floor.  I found the one from the spring of 2006, but I couldn't find myself in it.  I feel like I would have participated in that, but maybe not.

My old home

After St. Ed's, I walked around Main Quad and took some pictures.  Then I went to the bookstore and looked around, but I didn't buy anything.  From there, I walked over to the library to take a look at Touchdown Jesus.

Such a beautiful sight

Touchdown Jesus

Stay warm, Father Joyce and Father Hesburgh.

Finally, it was time for my stadium tour.  If I remember correctly, they didn't do those when I was a student.  I remember that the RAs got to take a stadium tour, but I don't think that they had them for the public (although let's not rule out the possibility that I was an idiot and didn't realize that they were available then).  So I've always wanted to do it, but they never had them on football weekends.  Back in 2013 when I was out there a day early because I was off on a Friday for All Saints Day, I did the tunnel tour, which is where you can walk down the tunnel to the field (something I had done as a student), but that was all you got to see.  The stadium tour actually starts in the Joyce Center.  They were already letting people in for the basketball game, so they kind of rushed us through the Purcell Pavilion side (with a short stop in Heritage Hall, which is pretty cool) and into the field house.  I think the first time I was ever in there was with Jorge for some fencing and I met Mariel Zagunis, who won gold medals in 2004 and 2008.  Jorge didn't tell me until later that it was the gold medal winner.  That used to be where we played hockey.  And it was a crappy set up for hockey.  I'm glad I got to see it again because later it would help me to appreciate the Compton Family Ice Arena even more.  The highlight of course is the football stadium.  It was interesting to see how it looks from the inside with the renovations going on (they've definitely made some progress since our last home game in November).  You don't really see all that much inside the stadium other than the locker room and the field, but that's all I needed to see anyway.  I guess it would be nice to go into the press box, but I don't think we have a press box right now with the current state of the renovations.  The locker room was really cool.  They tell some stories in there about the history of Notre Dame football (most of which I knew already anyway).  Then you get to walk down the steps and touch the Play Like a Champion Today sign.  This was awesome.  I have a Learn Like a Champion Today sign in my classroom so my students will appreciate the picture of me touching the sign.  Then you get to walk out to the field.  It was covered in snow, but I did get to stand in the end zone.  People had dug out a couple of small patches where you could see the field turf (I miss the grass, but alas).  I dragged my foot along the field turf to kick up the black rubber pellets.  I picked up a couple of them.

Win just one for the Gipper.

The locker room

Play Like a Champion Today

The east side of the stadium

The west side of the stadium

Me in the end zone

I could have stayed on the field for as long as they would let us, but I had a ticket for the basketball game, which was already starting.  So I rushed over to Purcell Pavilion.  I got in right at the first TV timeout.  Missing four and a half minutes of the game for the stadium tour was totally worth it (a couple of people actually left the tour early to go to the game and missed touching the Play Like a Champion Today sign and going on the field).  It was back and forth for most of the first half, but we had a pretty bad finish to the half and we went in down 43-36.  Nobody was really playing well for us except for Demetrius Jackson, who had 20.  We got out to a slow start in the second half too.  I think Louisville's biggest lead was 11.  But we finished the game very strong.  We led by six late in the game, but Louisville hit a three and then V.J. Beachem missed the front end of a 1 and 1.  Louisville missed a three that would have tied it and Zach Auguste was fouled with 4.4 seconds left.  He just needed to make the first to secure the victory, but he made both.  Auguste wasn't great, but he rebounded and made some big plays on both ends late in the game.  Jackson finished with 27 points and five assists.  Steve Vasturia was excellent in the second half and finished with 20 points.  Jerian Grant and Pat Connaughton were both in attendance with the NBA All Star break this weekend.  They both got a rousing ovation when they were recognized during a timeout.  Well deserved.  I was reminded of Grant going nuts at the end of regulation against Louisville in my favorite college basketball game of all time.

My view for the basketball game

I was thinking about who our biggest basketball rival is.  Greg mentioned Louisville, Syracuse and Pittsburgh.  All legitimate choices.  Kyle said Boston College, Marquette, and Louisville.  I wish we still played Marquette, but we don't anymore.  And Boston College is just so bad that it's hard to say them (Greg also said Boston College when we were students).  I would say Louisville.  We've been playing great games against them for a while.  The ACC scheduling formula has every team playing two teams twice annually, two teams twice on a rotating basis, and everybody else once.  The two teams we play twice annually are Boston College and Georgia Tech.  I'm fine with Boston College (the only other Catholic school in the ACC), but I wish we could replace Georgia Tech with Louisville.  We were really developing a great rivalry at the end of the Big East days and they're fairly close geographically.  Check out these numbers on Notre Dame-Louisville games, which have all been played since 2006 (13 overtime periods in 15 games).  So we should play them twice per year, but oh well.

After the basketball game, I headed across the parking lot to the Compton Family Ice Arena.  I had tried to check it out my last time on campus before the Stanford game.  Before meeting up with Wilhelm, I figured Compton would be open so I walked over there and the doors were locked.  On the doors were signs saying that the building was open until 1:00 and the doors would lock at 12:50.  I checked my watch and it was 12:51.  It is a beautiful facility.  It holds just over 5000.  Despite the small size, it does have some decent concession options.  In each corner of the arena was a different version of the interlocking ND logo.  This was my second Notre Dame hockey game of the year and third in the last three years (I saw us play UConn at Barclays Center in November and Boston College at Fenway Park in 2014).  I was sitting pretty much on one of the blue lines in the ninth row behind Maine's bench.  We had beaten Maine the night before 4-1.  We definitely got off to the better start in this game, but Maine's goalie had a pretty good first period.  We were out-shooting Maine early, but we couldn't break through until about 14 minutes into the game.  Maine ended up out-shooting us for the game 41-35, but I really felt like we were getting the better chances.  We ended up going up 5-0 in the third period.  I was hoping for the shutout, but Maine finally scored with just under three minutes left.  The final score was 5-1.

My view for the hockey game

After the hockey game, I finished up my day by going to the Subway at LaFortune for old time's sake.  It was also nice to walk around at night because it reminded me of the first time I was ever on campus (at night in November 2004).  I loved having Subway for free maybe 200 yards away from the dorm when I was a student.  I walked back to my hotel and went past the Grotto again (it looks great at night with all the candles glowing).  When I got back to the hotel, I had a victory beer at the bar for a great day of sports.

The Golden Dome in the dark

I got up early the next morning to go to mass in the crypt of the basilica.  I would have liked to go to a regular basilica mass, but they didn't have one early enough.  So the 6:30 mass in the basement worked well enough.  I walked around Main Quad one last time not knowing when I'll be back again (I don't know what I'm doing for football next season yet).  It was so good to be back.  I finished up by walking past the Grotto one last time.  It was three degrees that morning.  That morning and the night before, I felt warm standing at the Grotto.  It was a strange feeling.  Once I started walking back to the hotel, that was the only time I felt really really cold.  It was strange that it was colder walking back when the sun was coming up than when I was walking over in the dark.

The Grotto glowing at night with the Golden Dome in the background.  I felt warm despite the weather.

So the next time I'll be back will probably be for football.  But I'm glad I got back for something else.  The stadium tour was great.  Beating Louisville in basketball was awesome too.  Whatever happened in the hockey game wasn't going to disappoint me, but I'm glad that was an easy win as well.  Dodger Stadium is probably my second favorite place in the world (even though I have it ranked behind Fenway Park in my stadium rankings).  Notre Dame is number 1.

Supporting the Team

I took my first trip out of the state of 2016 on Super Bowl weekend.  I had been to 44 states.  Surprisingly, one of the states I hadn't been to borders New York.  I finally got to Maine last summer, so this trip to Vermont finished off New England.  Now the closest state that I haven't been to is South Carolina.

John had mentioned this weekend to me as a possibility back in the summer.  It was John, Sean, and Sean's wife Anne doing a Penguin Plunge in Lake Champlain.  I was glad to use this as my excuse to cross off Vermont.  They were raising money for the Special Olympics.  I definitely was not interested in participating, but much like David Puddy, I was willing to support the team.

Burlington is the biggest city in Vermont.  It's the smallest city to be the biggest in a state.  Its population is about the same as Hicksville, New York, where I work.  It's less densely populated than Hicksville because it's geographically bigger.  I flew up to Burlington on Friday night.  I figured a $137 round trip was worth it.  John drove up early Saturday morning.  We got breakfast at the Skinny Pancake and met Sean and Anne there.  I had the Crepedilla, which was quite good.

The view of Lake Champlain from my room.  Just kidding, my view was a parking garage.  This was from Sean and Anne's room.

We headed down to the lake around noon.  The weather was about as warm as you could reasonably hope for in Vermont in February.  John and Sean said that usually there's snow on the ground and the lake is frozen.  Not this time.  The high was 37 degrees.  They got pretty lucky because eight days later the high was 3.  I did notice that it felt much colder down by the water because the wind was blowing a lot more down there.  John was in and out as quickly as he could be.  He was the first one out of the water from his group.  Sean and Anne lingered in there for a little longer.  After the plunge, we met up with John's friend Rebecca (former Camp Alvernia employee) and her husband.

If not for those two people bundled up in the background, you might think it was warm.

After going back to the hotel and warming up for a bit, we went to a late lunch at a pizza place.  But apparently you weren't allowed to call the food pizza.  They were flatbreads (but if you had leftovers, they gave you a pizza box to pack them up in).  It's well known that I'm a pizza snob, but this wasn't bad.  John and I split a breakfast pizza (they were still serving brunch).  I cut out quickly to make it to the 4:00 vigil mass at St. Joseph's.

Pizza that we weren't allowed to call pizza.

After mass, I headed back to the hotel. John and Sean were watching some movie.  I wasn't really paying attention.  After the movie, we were planning on going to dinner, but not for a little while.  So I went back to my room and watched some of the Notre Dame-North Carolina game.  We left for dinner in the second half so I didn't see the end of the game.  I think we had tied it right around when we headed out.  I had to follow the end of our victory on my phone.  We got dinner at a Chinese place for Chinese New Year.  Then we went out and did some drinking.  I enjoyed various Vermont beers.  And at one point we met a Burlington TV personality who was friends with Anne (I don't remember her name).

I think this was a Grodziskie (a Polish Oak-Smoked Wheat Ale), which John ordered for me in honor of St. John Paul II.

So that was my 45th state.  It was a good time up in Vermont with everybody.  Number 46 will probably be South Carolina or Louisiana.  If it's Louisiana, Mississippi will by number 47 (that will be the same trip).  Alaska is most likely to be number 50.