Pitt Stopped

Morgantown was supposed to burn last night. All of the stars had aligned for a massive town-wide bon fire. The college football gods had even handed the school the lighter in the form of a wild NCAA football season where all the teams who should have been better than WVU lost games and set the Mountaineers up as potential National Champs. Then the gods handed them a couch to , light up, since the final game of the season pitted them (haha) against their all-time rivals from Pittsburgh. Even when the Mounties suck, the Pitt game is huge--and this one just happened to be the 100th meeting between the schools and if WVU won they would go to the National Championship Game.

It really doesn't get any bigger if you live around here.

The HSCGIED and I took the legendary WVU Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) monorail down to the stadium. The PRT is a Nixon-era albatross formed in the scary days around the fuel crises of the 1970s. It's a monorail that was supposed to serve as a model for cities around they nation, but 30 years later, no one has copied it yet. Sure, the PRT prevented us from driving in traffic and it was actually kind of fun to ride, but people like their cars. And hence, freshman are still seen sitting in traffic in their Honda Civics while the PRT wizzes past overhead at half capacity. The next time you think about how mass transit could solve our traffic, global warming and gas price troubles, think about projects like this that actually happened and never took off.

Anyway it was nuts down at the stadium. Morgantown only has about 30,000 residents but the stadium holds more than twice that, and there was a basketball game in town, so people were jammed everywhere. We tailgated in the cold and everyone lived it up. I have no vested interest in the results of the game since I didn't go to college here and I've never really been a college football fan. But for just about everyone else here, this was huge.

But as the football Gods served WVU a game on a silver platter, someone tripped and knocked the platter right over. The Mountaineers lost a game in which they were heavily, heavily favored and blew their chance to play for the national title. On a big national TV game at home against their all-time rivals who weren't even ranked this year.

I was really glad I didn't attend school here at this point, because this really, really would have hurt.