Someone's Going to Win

The reaction in my house to the Iowa Hawkeyes football team being defeated by a VERY good & VERY talented Michigan State Spartan team was swift and illogical. These are some of the comments I heard in the room I watched the game in, but these are not comments I said:

• They were overrated from the beginning.
• All this hype about football - it's stupid.
• Why can't Iowa win a big game?

OF COURSE I'm disappointed. Gazette reporter Mike Hlas sums up my feelings in the first sentence of his column: "This one’s going to hurt for about forever." It's only mildly comforting to remember that at 5:15 Mass, shortly before the beginning of the game, Father Page told us, "I have a prediction. Someone's going to win, someone's going to lose, and there's going to be a lot of booze." I don't know if he had happened to be on social media when it was reported that Indianapolis, the city in which the Big Ten Championship game was played, had run out of beer, as reported in this article. And yes, waking up with a hangover after a hard fought loss makes the throbbing and nausea that much worse - unfortunately, I know from personal experiences.

So, now, with the game over and the agony of defeat soaking into every Iowa fan's brain, my opinion is that I wish they would have won, sure, but I'm not going to be mad about it. I'm not going to let a football game ruin my day or the rest of my weekend. I'm confident there will be a zillion Iowa fans that have either lost faith in the team and / or fallen off the train that was steamrolling to a 12-0 record. The fact that the game was close - 16 - 13 - isn't much consolation and the fact that the last series of the game didn't provide a lot of hope. Iowa got the ball back with 27 seconds and no timeouts remaining. The first play was a MSU sack of quarterback C.J. Bertherd and the clock didn't stop. The second play was to spike the ball, and the third play, with :05 seconds remaining, was  unsuccessful, which isn't surprising as plays that are designed to lateral the ball from one player to another with time expiring are rarely successful.

I just was looking ahead to the Iowa 2016 schedule, which I think is logical to do. How awesome does Lucas Oil Stadium look in this picture? Who wouldn't want the Iowa Hawkeyes to return there on 12/3/2016?