Boise-Nevada game worth the frustration

Monday, November 30, 2009 - 1:32 AM

Emily Katseanes

My dad, my brother and I were all alone in a sea of orange. Whenever the stands went silent in Boise as Nevada stole the ball or gained some ground, you might just have been able to hear my brother and me chanting “Wolf Pack” back and forth. If you were really listening, you probably could also hear everyone around us disapproving. We were at the Boise-Nevada football game and the three of us were the only Nevada fans on our side of the stands.

A few days earlier, the three of us had driven over the river and through the woods for Thanksgiving dinner at our relatives’ house in the battleground city itself. Over turkey with my dad’s brothers, their wives and their children, who had all grown up in Idaho, there were two reactions to conversation about the game: They were sure Boise would be victorious and they were shocked I even cared.

I have often been at odds with my extended family. These are practical people and I’m as whimsical as they come. Almost all my cousins hold records for various high school sports, and post-college (where most of them study practical things, like business), they go on to careers of tactile work as doctors, farmers or deckhands on yachts. My biggest victory in high school was graduating and realizing I never had to play sports again. I’m a liberal arts major and looking forward to doing abstract work in an office.

I hadn’t seen a lot of this family in a long time. Some of them I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade and I hadn’t even met my cousin’s wife. But all ice was immediately broken when my dad said, “Emily’s going to the game, too.”

Instead of foundering in awkward small talk, we spent the rest of the evening trash-talking and footballing, which, since I like Nevada sports, I could actually participate in (though once discussion traveled outside the WAC, I was lost).

The next day, my dad, brother and I wore our Wolf Pack gear at the mall. Once again, I was with two guys I usually have less to discuss with than my mom and sister (the three of us can debate color combinations forever), but it didn’t matter. We scowled at every Broncos hat and made jokes about the animal superiority of wolves over ponies.

At the game that night, it was rainy, chilly and so steamy from the more than 32,000 bodies in the stadium that I thought my glasses were fogging up. We yelled, we chanted, we moaned when everyone around us cheered and we tried to stay warm. By the end of the first quarter, I couldn’t feel my toes. By halftime, my fingers and nose had joined them in numbness. By the beginning of the fourth quarter, our tinny chants had gotten a little more desperate.

We all wanted to win. My dad, my brother, me and every Nevada fan in the small, vocal, navy blue bleachers across from us wanted Nevada to wipe the annoying blue field with the Broncos’ pride. But when we milled out of the stadium that night, even though our team was defeated, we were smiling.

It was wet, cold and disappointing, but it was fun. It was cozy in my immediate family’s bubble of Pack Pride and even cozier in the extended family’s ring of football debates. And as for the team itself, there’s always next year.

Emily Katseanes is still puzzled by Boise State’s blue field. Reach her at ekatseanes@nevadasagebrush.com.