November 11, 2000.  Virginia Tech beat UCF 44-21 that day behind a five-touchdown performance from Lee Suggs, while Hokie quarterback Dave Meyer and running back Andre Kendrick combined to go 2-of-8 through the air for 55 yards.  Oh, if you think Tech’s passing game is bad right now…haha.

Now, why am I bringing up a game from 21 years ago?  Because that’s the last time I had missed a Virginia Tech football game in its entirety.  I’ve watched at least part of every single game since that day, though I do remember missing most of the Marshall game in 2005 to attend a funeral.  But I did watch part of it, so the 21-year streak was intact.  Until Saturday, that is.

I went to Atlanta for the World Series on Friday and Saturday nights, and seeing the Braves in the World Series was always the No. 1 item on my life’s bucket list.  They hadn’t been in 22 years, and if it takes them another 22 years to get back, I’d be 60 years old at that point, so I decided I needed to go now.  I spent most of the week toying with whether or not I wanted to go to the VT-GT game, but with the Braves’ stadium about a 25-minute drive from Atlanta proper (and perhaps worse with World Series traffic), I decided that spending that much time (and money) in an Uber going from one end of Atlanta to another may run the risk of ruining my complete World Series experience.

So I decided to watch it in my hotel room, which had the channel on which the game was being shown in Georgia according to the guide.  Except when I turned on the TV at noon, there was nothing but a black screen on that channel, and when I tried it on my ESPN app on my phone, it was blacked out.  I was laying in bed thinking, “well, I guess I should walk down to The Battery to find the game on TV.  I’d miss the first quarter during the walk, but oh well.”

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