32 years and counting: A love letter to my Michigan Wolverines

I am obsessed with Michigan football. This obsession has cost me money, time and possibly years (all that elevated blood pressure during too many close games — I don’t even want to know the damage). Still, I have no regrets.

I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1992 and exercised my option, as a new Wolverine alumna, to buy season football tickets. They were nearly impossible to get otherwise, and I wasn’t about to miss my chance. This was a YOLO move before YOLO was a thing.

Did I expect to use those tickets and attend those games anytime soon? I did not. I had just graduated and joined the U.S. Navy. Uncle Sam controlled my schedule, and I made about $18,000 a year.  Buying those tickets (a set of two cost nearly $500) was the most indulgent thing I’d ever done.

I didn’t know it then, but I had invested in a lifelong passion. I’ve been a season ticket holder for 32 years now and God willing, I will be for another 32.

As the daughter of two alumni, I was helpless to resist the gravitational pull of Ann Arbor. I grew up wearing Michigan sweatshirts and visiting my parents’ favorite places on campus.

While a student at Michigan, I unofficially majored in extracurricular activities including two sororities (one service and one social) and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, but my absolute favorite was the marching band. Performing on the field every Saturday was thrilling. I played “The Victors” (our fight song) on my tuba at least 1,000 times, but it never got old.

Between my time in the navy and then my career in the automotive industry, I moved around a lot and rarely made it back to Ann Arbor in the first few years after graduation, but I renewed my tickets annually like clockwork. I sold all the ones I couldn’t use. Before the days of online ticket exchanges, I relied on family and friends to find homes for them. I broke even.

In 1995 I married Tom, a fellow Wolverine who, like me, had two season tickets. He has many other fine qualities, but I’d be lying if I said his love of Michigan football didn’t matter. It mattered a lot and still does.

My husband and I made a pact that we’d attend at least two home games a year, and we made it happen despite our student loans, our busy jobs and the fact that we lived more than 700 miles away. Even when we couldn’t get back to Ann Arbor, we always found a way to watch on television. During the big contest against archrival Ohio State in 1997, I was on a business trip to Florida and working on Saturday. I may have “disappeared” for a couple of hours to catch the game at a nearby sports bar. Michigan won.

The arrival of a baby in July of 2000 complicated game day logistics, but we managed to stick to our pact. We did it by leaving work early on Friday, flying to Detroit, and arriving at the in-laws late on the evening before the game (I am so grateful to my village of babysitters). Parents of newborns travel with an amount of equipment and supplies that rivals Napoleon’s army, but we never doubted the decision to schlepp it all to Michigan for 48 hours. I pre-gamed by pumping breastmilk in our parked rental car, seeking modesty under a blanket while cheerfully drunk college students stumbled past on the sidewalk.

We repeated this routine every fall as our children grew. We picked up the kids from school a few minutes early to beat the traffic and make the 4:25 p.m. Delta flight, feeding them snacks in the car and supervising homework at 30,000 feet.

Frequent trips like this meant a lot of work. I arranged for pet care and made excuses for the kids to miss violin lessons, soccer games and birthday parties. Once the kids were old enough, they came to the games with us instead of staying with their grandparents, and the generational indoctrination continued. Our youngest is now a senior at Michigan and attends every game, sitting in the front row of the student section.

Tom and I are now empty nesters and go to every single home game. We go because we love it. We love it because that stadium feels like home. “The Big House” is the largest stadium in the country, with an official capacity of 107,601 but with attendance record over 115,109 set in 2013 (we were there). We have experienced the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat on those hard metal benches. We’ve been sweaty and sunburned, numb with cold and soaking wet under flimsy plastic ponchos. But we’re always surrounded by Our People.

In Michigan Stadium, we ride an emotional roller coaster with tens of thousands of like-minded strangers, experience collective joy and anguish, clutch each other’s hands while watching big third down plays, and share exuberantly sloppy high fives when we score. Everyone knows it’s only a game and doesn’t really matter. We also know that nothing is more important. Both are somehow true.

Last year, Michigan won the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and advanced to the College Football Playoff National Championship in Houston. We flexed our travel chops to make those trips happen, booking multiple flights and backup Airbnb options we could change moments after the first game ended, knowing that a loss would mean we had to fly home, but a victory would mean traveling directly to Texas. By now we are pros at this. And Michigan became National Champions for only the second time in my life.

Football season is wrapping up now. The Wolverines aren’t as good this year, and those championship games are not on our calendar. Tom and I won’t be back in The Big House until next season, when we’ll look over at the young people in the student section and think, “That used to be us.” We’ll also smile when we see older couples, leaning on each other while carefully navigating the stadium steps, and think “That will be us someday."

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