Wake 30, Florida State 0

I got chills just typing that in. What can I say? Can I say anything to adequately describe how it felt watching Wake go down to Tallahassee and slap around the Seminoles?

Florida State joined the ACC while I was a student at Wake. The first time the Seminoles came to Groves Stadium, an assistant brought a little plastic chair over to the FSU sidelines after the teams had taken the field. Bobby Bowden sat down in the little plastic chair. At halftime, Bowden got up and ran into the locker room. At the start of the second half, Bowden sat down again. He didn't get back up until the final gun, when he walked to midfield and shook Bill Dooley's hand and tried to act like a gracious winner.

I don't remember the score of that game - don't much want to - but I remember Bobby and his chair, dadgumit. And I thought about Bobby and his little plastic chair as Wake shut him out at Doak Campbell for the first time in Bowden's career.*

I thought about Bobby and his little plastic chair; I giggled like a schoolgirl; I jumped up and down; I hollered (not screamed or shouted - hollered, and there is a difference); I got a grin that wouldn't go away. My spinal cord shimmied as my mind opened up to new possibilities, as neural regions long dormant began to wake up and explore a brave new world.

Suddenly, it's completely realistic:
- to talk about Wake's chances for an ACC championship
- to talk about Wake playing in the Orange Bowl
- to wonder if Wake will finish in the Top Ten
- to wonder if Wake will win out the season

I've even heard that someone's worked out a scenario that would take Wake to the BCS championship game (if anyone has a link to that, please post it here).

Wake Forest is 9-1. No Wake Forest team has ever won 9 games in one season. Some Wake Forest teams haven't won 9 games in consecutive seasons.

This Wake Forest team is so good, and this season has been so magical, that I have sunk to a Neolithic mentality and honestly worry that I will do something to screw it all up. Powerful mojo is at work around this team, and any one of us could do something to offend JoBu and break the spell. I watched the FSU game from yet another motel room - I'm sick of motel rooms, but if the magic of this season requires me to be gone so much, then I will happily hie myself from Winston-Salem, and I'd do it all again, too. I watched the game sitting in an easy chair, my legs resting on an ottoman, my right leg over my left. My left leg fell asleep, but I did not want to move it - not if there was a chance that the position of my legs had pleased the spirits, and my moving would displease them. If the players can sacrifice their bodies on the field, I can sacrifice mine in my easy chair. At halftime I was already so excited that I wanted to go down to the hotel bar, grab a beer, see who was about - but I could not leave that room so long as the mojo was on Wake's side. If the mojo demanded my solitude, my isolated ecstasy, then I would give it my solitude for as long as the game lasted. I'd have stayed where I was while the hotel burned down around me.

That same pre-scientific, borderline-pagan mentality has helped answer the original question of this blog, though. Why submit yourself to the trial, to the quest, to the 12 labors of Hercules or the taking of the Golden Fleece? Because the reward is glorious, and made more glorious by the righteous test first endured.

Why do you root for a football team like Wake Forest's? Because Wake is your alma mater, or your hometown school, and loyalty is a virtue. Because they recruit good kids who go to class and graduate, who so far haven't shot anybody, who may not be blue-chippers but play their guts out week after week after week. Because they're coached by a man like Jim Grobe, who's tough but not a bully. Because they're the underdog in almost every game, because they've defied the odds and the economics of college football just to field a team at Division 1A, much less win.

Why root for a football team like Wake Forest's?

Because of the chance for a season like this.

* My former FSU fan friend Frazer says Miami shut out the 'Noles at home in the 1980s, but every report on the game I've seen has said Wake's was the first of the Bowden era.