Revenge of the nerds

Stanford 17; USC 3.   A football win, early in the season.  Who really cares?  Why do I care?

You who have attended schools like Michigan, Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame,  or Nebraska -- traditional football powers -- won't understand.  But I began rooting for Stanford back when they still called themselves, without embarrassment, "Indians." 

How interesting, you yawn.  So how was Stanford football back then?  You want to know, I reply?  In my years there we had seasons of 2-8, 3-7, 0-10, and 4-6.  Attending football games was like being a Chicago Cubs baseball fan.  An entertainment, if you looked at it the right way, but an exercise in futility if winning meant anything to you.

Which it did, to me, to some extent.

But the real issue was USC.  USC in those days wasn't just a good school with a history of winning conference championships.  At least as I viewed it, USC was evil incarnate.  I believed, as did all of my classmates, that winning was secondary in Trojan players' minds as they entered our stadium. Their primary goal was to inflict as much pain and personal injury on our players as possible.  They were animals.  Blood lust.  There were unspeakable occurrences, reported in newspapers, that could be adduced to support our belief.

It made you want to hit back.  But they were huge and mighty.  Our players were slender (relatively) and geeky.  If we had all gone to the same school, Trojan players would have broken our players' glasses and slammed them into lockers.

And so the years passed.  Stanford had some good years -- Elway comes to mind -- but these were isolated periods.  More characteristic was "The Play" at Cal, where our fellow geeks across the Bay stole the 1982 Big Game by a series of questionable laterals on the last play of the game, running  around and through our marching band (which happened to be prematurely on the field).

But then came 2007, annus mirabilis, when USC got its come-uppance.  As I noted in a blog post for that year, Stanford -- 42 point underdogs -- upset USC 24-23.  Often called the greatest upset in college football  history.  USC has had great moments since that game, but it has never quite regained its self-confidence.  It seems quieter, more subdued.  Tommy Trojan doesn't gallop around in his absurd armor with the same gusto. 

Stanford and USC play more or less as equals now, each of us sometimes winning, sometimes losing.

But guys who were bullied as kids never quite get over it as adults.  For those of us whose memories go back through the fogs of yesteryear, our school is still a bunch of four-eyed weirdos -- "nerds" as our quarterback Andrew Luck so candidly put it -- and USC is still the class bully.

So even a victory like tonight's, between two decent teams, neither of which is apt to be crowned as national champion, still registers in my mind and within my emotions as a case of Harry Potter defeating Voldemort.  Zowie!  We did it!  Once more, we have saved civilization as we know it!  Begone, Trojans, back to your Coliseum, your filthy Den of Iniquity.