Deja Vu

There's something about BYU vs. UCLA games that doesn't work for me.

We were planning on leaving Saturday morning at 9am. So I got up at 8am and went to climb in the shower. I was in for a rude awakening when I went to turn on the water and nothing happened. I found out later that without giving any kind of advance warning some construction crew down the street just turned off the water to the whole neighborhood. So after a few minutes of scrambling around and placing phone calls I determined that my sister and her husband (my transportation to Vegas) had slept in, and additionally their shower head had snapped off, and they just had water coming out of a pipe at their apartment. I opted for door number 2, which was an invitation to drive to a friend's house in Los Alamitos and use that shower. Point being, we got something of a late start.

Let's just say the trip did not go well at all, and was pretty much an unpleasant experience from start to finish, I'll leave it at that. We were late for the game. A friend of mine called just a few minutes before kickoff to get my score prediction. He said he could hear the anxiety in my voice when I told him that I wasn't at the game yet. As though missing kickoff the first time BYU played UCLA this season wasn't bad enough, I actually managed to miss it again the second time. Admittedly by the time I got to my seat I was so worked up about the trip there, that all I was wearing was a jacket and I felt fine. It was a good 15 minutes before I calmed down enough to realize that it was freezing cold, and had to start piling on the additional layers I had with me. Thankfully I had my battery heated socks on, and my toes stayed warm the entire time.

The game itself was something of a stressful experience as well. For anyone who watched the game, "take a knee," is the only comment I would like to make. I try hard not to curse, because I really don't think it's very ladylike, but obviously I need to work harder on that during football games.

The ending was beautiful though. Just seconds before the FG attempt I did have the thought that it would be really great if this could just somehow be another Kaneshiro clang. I figured it was too much to hope for, and was trying to mentally prepare myself for the loss. The jump from one emotion to the other is always sort of an extreme adrenaline rush, and for some reason it seems to wipe out my memory. There was that moment it took to process the reality that BYU had just won, and then the proceeding celebration is all something of a blur. I probably embarrassed myself, in which case it's better that I can't get a clear recollection of what exactly happened. I can also pretty much say the same thing about the last two utah games.

I wanted to rush down and have someone snap a picture of me on the field, but I found out that Ethan and Jared were gifted last minute tickets to the game, and so I abandoned the idea of getting a picture on the field and instead went and found them so I could hitch a ride the rest of the way home that night instead of spending the night in Vegas. We pulled in around 5:30am. I slept until 1pm the next day.