I didn’t say these would all be happy memories.

I referenced this game in an earlier post, and it was as horrible an experience as you might imagine. My folks were sitting together in a visitors’ section, but we picked up a spare ticket for me — alone, in the opposite end zone, miles from the nearest fellow Buckeye. I had shit thrown at me while Ohio State’s band played its pregame show, and any time I walked up or down the aisle to my seat.

And then my Buckeyes, who would have clinched Big Ten title and a Rose Bowl Trip with a win, got waxed 28-0. With a couple minutes left in the game, I said goodbye to the nice ladies sitting next to me — one of whom was the mother of a Michigan player — and walked down to the concourse where I found a payphone and called my girlfriend — now The Wife — at our apartment in Athens. I asked her to tell me that there was more to life than football, which she dutifully did.

I didn’t believe her. Still don’t.

And I still haven’t been back to Ann Arbor.