Trends, trendiness, wanting to be trendy – especially with fashion – has always confused me. It’s hard to wrap my head around a concept where looking like everyone else is the goal. Feels more like an episode of the Twilight Zone whenever I encounter what’s trending out in the wild. I’m all for a good costume theme, but have subzero interest in looking like everyone else. I want to be witchy and weird, a display of oddities.*

Over time I’ve played many roles, worn a lot of hats, donned different costumes applicable to the moment. One repeat historical character in my repertoire is that of Sports Fan. Or perhaps Sport Fan, room for only one season of disappointment per year.

My fandom launched with baseball, teaching myself stats to impress a boy in elementary school. That morphed into whichever high school sport my crush played or attended – athlete and fan of equal importance, did you even win if no one was there to hoot n’ holler? Plus, with only so many opportunities to convene in small towns, everyone is a valuable participant.

Obviously hopped over to football in college, because what a way to spend a Saturday as a freshman in Madison, Wisconsin. Finally full-circled back to baseball before Covid killed all kinds of joy. Now I don’t think much about any sport at all, except for when a nephew advances to the collegiate level and the family text chain breathes some life. 

But I do enjoy the opportunity to sporadically re-immerse myself in current sport culture, take note of what’s changed, what’s stayed the same. A measure of time of sorts. So when my brother offered his seats to the Badger football season opener, it was hard to pass up considering B had never experienced football Saturday in Madison or the magic that is Camp Randall, and that’s worth doing at least once, right? Ask 2010 Scott Van Pelt.

If I’m using college sports as a measure of time, it would appear we’ve blasted off to another dimension. Remember how Christmas lost its magic? It was kinda like that. 

To pump us both up for the Thursday night game, I spent the three-mile walk to the stadium regaling B with stories from my college days, Saturday traditions, rowdy tailgates, pub shenanigans, student section rivalries, marching band antics, fifth quarters. Memories fresh, I was greeted by discord the moment I stepped into the stadium.

Why was everything so…cold? Impersonal? Commercialized. Like walking into the belly of one huge advertisement. Or like we’d just accidentally discovered the movie set for the young adult novel Feed by M.T. Anderson (2002) which “takes place in a near-futuristic American culture completely dominated by advertising and corporate exploitation, corresponding to the enormous popularity of internet working brain implants called feeds.” Read it. It’s creepy.

I strained to catch the nostalgic vibrations of the stadium over the noise booming through the loudspeaker, advert after advert after advert. Wait, were there any other sounds? The band barely made a peep until the second quarter, reminded me of the disorienting 2008 game against Ohio State they were banned from due to hazing allegations, so strange and off without them. The students were inaudible. Why wasn’t P telling O to eat shit? I didn’t even know what to do with myself when a shitty techno version of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline roared out of the PA system. And I don’t recall the Camp Randall choir continuing Build Me Up Buttercup after the music ended, if it even played at all, though it’s possible I was too distracted trying to piece together this new normal. We ended up leaving after Jump Around. Even that felt lackluster. 

Weird. I looked around, desperate for confirmation something was off. This was not how I remembered it, even in years the Badgers were terrible. Everything was all wrong. Different. Foreign. Am I too sober?

Does any of this seem weird to you? I asked the dude next to me, who looked exactly like what ChatGPT might come up with if you asked it to show you a football fan, make him a dad, a rich dad, but not toooo rich. Definitely in multiple fantasy leagues. Loves scotch and cheap beer. He glanced over at me with a different puzzled look, and we both knew I was the weirdest thing he had seen that day. Damn tooth.

Sean texted a few days later. Did you have fun?

How to describe this strange feeling of loss. And how relieved I was to hear he too had noticed games migrating toward the generic. Even his teenaged kids felt it. More in-your-face advertising, fewer time-honored traditions. Less playful, more business. What a shame, what a loss, we lamented. 

And then. Ha. Are we just getting old? Isn’t this what happens to everyone? Why people sing songs about the good ‘ole days? We can’t be the first people to experience wild adaptations of beloved pastimes and traditions. Remember when our parents told all those stories about walking uphill to school both ways in the snow, all the back-in-my-day lores folks are always happy to narrate? I gotta believe each generation sees things they love change, morph, become something new, something different. And with each version, what a shame, what a loss, they must have lamented.

As the second half kicked off, I tried to put my finger on exactly what was so different. Back in my day, fans held their keys high up in the air before kickoff, shaking, clanking, jingling, stomping their feet faster, FASTER until oooooooOOOOOOoh K I C K! And that didn’t happen once. Failure to pass down tradition? Bad game of telephone? Everyone forgot their keys? Omg. Keys. The kids don’t have keys anymore! Of course. In a world filled with keyless entry, key fobs, door codes, fingerprint ID, Face ID…the kids don’t have keys anymore. 

Ah, good ‘ole Change, life’s only constant. Okay, fair, I get it. Modernizing with the student body. But like, is it just me, or is it starting to feel like everything’s modernizing at a frighteningly quick lightning speed?

Boldly going where no man has gone before, with an asterisk.

*Shit’s about to get wild.