For Love Of The Game?

This morning, I find that Dewayne and Bj have both blogged about sports rivalries between their respective alma maters. I even found our employee store carrying candles striped in the colors of the big schools. This is, I gather, important to some people. I went to a much smaller school (e.g., my graduating class was about 450 people) in Oregon, and I honestly don't remember much inter-school rivalry. In 4 years, in fact, I think I attended one sporting event: a Homecoming (football) game. Even at my five-year reunion, I managed to miss the game. It's not that our teams did poorly — as I recall, we did well in our league, according to the reports in the Collegian (now there's a name I haven't used in years) — I just never held much interest in sports in general, and it wasn't a campus-consuming madness.

Maybe that's just a function of school size, though. The game between U of Oregon and Oregon State U seemed to be a big deal, if for no other reason than it was one of two guaranteed freeway-clogging annual events in the Willamette Valley — the other being the U of Oregon/U of Washington game.