{"id":57933,"date":"2024-12-28T00:03:40","date_gmt":"2024-12-28T00:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=57933"},"modified":"2024-12-28T03:04:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-28T03:04:30","slug":"talking-football-with-stranger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=57933","title":{"rendered":"Talking football with stranger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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For those of us who have watched folks from all over the country enjoy college football success, I was struck this morning with an opportunity to talk a little tackle football with a guy I didn’t know from the Man in the Moon.<\/p>\n

I was riding an elevator at a Barnes & Noble Booksellers store in Frisco, Texas, when a fellow wearing a bright green shirt with a bright yellow “O” emblazoned on its front walked into the elevator.<\/p>\n

I looked for just a second at the guy’s shirt and blurted out “Go, Ducks.” His face lit up like my Christmas tree at home … or likely at his home, too. “Yeah, it’s going to be a great game on Wednesday,” he said. Yep. The “great game” will feature the No. 1- ranked Oregon Ducks against The Ohio State Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl.<\/p>\n

We both chuckled at the notion that the Ducks now belong to the Big Ten football conference, which he and I admitted we had learned to hate growing up in Oregon. He hails from Klamath Falls; I was raised in Portland. “All my friends have moved from K Falls to Portland,” he said, “so I still have a lot of friends in Oregon.”<\/p>\n

Why hate the Big Ten? Because the Ducks belonged to the Pac-12 but then gravitated this past year to the Big Ten. The Ducks won the Big Ten championship and will represent that conference as its champs against Ohio State, a perennial Big Ten powerhouse. The Ducks had beaten the Buckeyes earlier this year in Eugene, a 32-31 nailbiter. Our goal every year was to cheer on the Pac-12 in the Rose Bowl, which historically pitted the Pacific Coast conference against the Big Ten champs.<\/p>\n

The Pac-12 is now down to the “Pac-2,” with just Oregon State and Washington State remaining in what once was a proud football conference. “It’s better than being in the Pac-2,” he said. Indeed …<\/p>\n

We went our ways. I am sure we’ll end up metaphorically in the same place on Wednesday afternoon, in front of our respective TV sets cheering on the University of Oregon against Ohio State.<\/p>\n

Go, Ducks!<\/p>\n\n

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For those of us who have watched folks from all over the country enjoy college football success, I was struck this morning with an opportunity to talk a little tackle football with a guy I didn’t know from the Man in the Moon. I was riding an elevator at a Barnes & Noble Booksellers store … Continue reading Talking football with stranger<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[3440,4023],"class_list":["post-57933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports-news","tag-oregon-ducks","tag-rose-bowl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57933"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57936,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57933\/revisions\/57936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}