I have a friend who cracks me up. He can’t wait for the Virginia Tech football season
to start. He lives locally, and he drives by his tailgating spot every day, like
it’s a house under construction that he needs to monitor. “I’m like a kid
waiting for Christmas,” he confesses. And I am reminded again that college
football is the greatest sport on earth, and Hokie football is the greatest part
of the greatest sport.

I
laugh at him. “You mean you don’t get all worked up?” he asks me.

“Well, I do and I don’t,” I tell him, and struggle to explain.
Years ago, when I lived in Charlottesville in the late 80s and early 90s, I was
insane for Hokie football. I lived and breathed Tech football, especially after
Tech picked itself up off the mat around 1989 and 1990 and started to get good.
Of course, the local Charlottesville paper (The Daily Progress, lovingly
called The Daily Regress by all who read it) never talked about Tech
football, so I would buy the USA Today and go through the sports section, just
looking for the words “Virginia Tech” anywhere. Most days the Hokies
weren’t mentioned, so I would have to settle for reading Tech’s name in the
betting lines. Sigh.

The arrival of the Hokie Huddler in the mail each week was the most
anticipated event of my week, because it was my only chance to read in-depth
about Hokie football. In this day and age of national coverage, heavy ESPN
coverage, weekly TV broadcasts, and the Internet (making every newspaper and a
handful of sites dedicated to VT readily available), that lack of coverage is
hard to imagine. But it existed.

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