Another wonderfully busy weekend has come and gone. With this one, many things happened which necessitated that some of my homework get pushed back, which then in turn meant I had a bunch to do yesterday morning which meant that there was no time to add to the journal. Now that that has passed, here’s a new entry.
Thursday night I went to the cities to meet my parents and pick up Ryan for the weekend. This was probably the last weekend he’d get to stay with me before I’m finally done for good here at SJU. It was a good weekend for him to come up because he managed to witness history in the making. John Gagliardi, the coach of the SJU football team for 55 years, won his 409th game to become the only college football coach of any division with that many wins. It seems amazing that our very own SJU coach holds the record for most wins now.
In going along with him breaking the record, there was a record-breaking amount of people and media on campus on Saturday. We usually get around 2 or 3 thousand people per game, and if it’s homecoming or the Johnnie/Tommie game we might get 5-7 thousand max, but with the hype machine churning for the last year or so, we had well over 13,000 people in attendance for Saturday’s game. That’s about twice as many people as we have for our most prolific game every season, and those games feel packed.
Ryan and I were going to go to the game on Saturday, but about three hours before the start of the game, I talked to someone who was over at the stadium and they told me it was completely packed and crazy already. Since Ryan and I don’t like crowds, we stayed in our apartment and listened to it on the radio while we played cards. It was an extremely close game and there were many times that it seemed like we wouldn’t be able to pull it out. We were playing an undefeated Bethel team, but we came out on top 29-26 for a stunning win. Sports Illustrated put up a nice article here. Along with SI, there was media from almost every other outlet there as well—every local radio, tv, and print news provider, ESPN, and a bunch of other sporting publications.
We experienced the overwhelming crowd just a little ourselves when we tried to leave for St. Cloud about an hour after the game was over. Just getting out of campus was a chore and it took us about 15 minutes just to get out of our parking lot. We took a back way into town as the main road was one solid line of metal and rubber. People who were taking the bus between campuses Saturday were treated to, on average, one hour bus rides instead of the 10 minutes it usually takes to get between campuses. It was simply incomprehensible how many people were packed onto our little campus on Saturday. Considering the entire SJU student body is under 2,000 students having more than six times that many people around was really amazing.
Besides the football game, Ryan and I had a lot of fun doing other things as well, mostly video games and movies. We went to see The Matrix Revolutions on Thursday night. There was a group of about 10 of us that went and most of us enjoyed it. Besides the ungodly amount of special effects in the movie, the other thing I really enjoyed was the score. I enjoyed it so much so that I ended up getting it. As opposed to the soundtracks for the last two matrix movies, this one was made up of classical and a little opera instead of retread nu-metal and techno.
On the ride back to my place Ryan picked up State of Emergency for the Xbox to play. It seems like every time he comes up he gets a new game, but that’s fine by me because they end up staying at my place anyhow. It’s a pretty cool game and a lot of fun to play multiplayer. The other thing I like about this game is it allows you to use the songs that have been ripped onto the Xbox hard drive as the soundtrack to the game. It’s the only game that allows me to do this. What I don’t understand is why that isn’t a common feature for all games. I can’t imagine it is that hard to implement. I often get sick of the stock music with most games and simply turn it off after a while. Instead of having silence for the music track, it would be great to listen to the 150+ songs that I have on my hard drive, so if any Xbox game developers are out there, make sure that you can use custom soundtracks for every game you develop!
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