It’s hard to put Saturday into words without using a stupid cliche like “It’s hard to put into words”. I can honestly say I’ve spent most of my life putting in as much effort as a fan possibly could. If you know me and you have joined us for a tailgate you know. For 3+ months every year, my focus is Michigan Football, planning for Michigan Football tailgates, organizing away game travel, and talking shit to people around me about the greatness of Michigan Football. And despite all signs to the contrary, I’ve always, and I mean ALWAYS, believed. Like, unhealthy belief. If you ever heard me say Michigan wasn’t going to win, I assure you it was out of superstition, me trying to quell my unachievable expectations through mantra, or some grandiose idea that I can control outcomes of games with reverse psychology.

Saturday I attended my 271st straight Michigan Game: Home, Away and Bowl. 21 and a half seasons. A silly habit born of being a student at Michigan in 1997, that became an obsession and now somehow feels like a calling. We’ve all got hobbies I guess. Mine is chasing that feeling. It’s rare as hell and I think it can only be felt in person. 1995 OSU, 1997 PSU & OSU, 2003 OSU, 2004 MSU, 2006 Notre Dame, 2011 OSU, and maybe some Denard stuff under the lights. And that’s it.

Chasing 1997 has long since morphed into chasing 2003, and that journey has been long and oftentimes disappointing. Sitting through the tail end of Lloyd’s tenure with App State, RichRod and the first taste of under .500 and being home for bowl season, and Brady and his lack of a headset. But really the monotony of it all, just riding out season after season with an ending that for my teens and 20’s was nearly impossible to fathom: losing to Ohio State. You can’t do anything, ANYTHING, if you lose to Ohio State. There are no championships available for the loser of The Game. And Michigan had lost 15 of the last 16 going in to Saturday.

Seems like only yesterday that Michigan found a way to hire one of my childhood heroes and owner of most of my earliest sports memories to lead this team in the way I wanted it led. But that was 7 long years ago. And over the last few years he started to show signs of wear, and that system, the one I believed in, the one for the good guys, seemed like it might not be enough to overcome what the bad guys were doing. Then Covid hit, some key pieces bailed on a season with little meaning, and Michigan really tanked it, going a full year without a home victory, which was particularly devastating for my cardboard cutout.

2021 was never supposed to be about beating Ohio or getting Harbaugh off the hot seat, it was about scrapping and clawing for signs of life. Can we just start over? Orlando was the ceiling. The literal floor was the floor. A tough-when-scheduled non-conference game and an absolutely daunting road slate awaited. And little of that mattered, because we were a 2-4 team and there was always an Ohio State game to lose. Somehow the stars aligned though, and the hearts and minds of a group of kids (and I’m including the most of the coaching staff when I say “kids”) came together to be much more than the sum of their parts. Quietly Michigan returned to spending a bit of each day on Ohio. And maybe if you can beat Ohio with it, you can beat anybody with it. That combined with something that had been missing, call it “resolve” I guess, helped pull out games in Lincoln and Happy Valley, in no small part due to some real “dudes.” These dudes spent most the year on the cusp of Michigan lore, destined to be forgotten when another Thanksgiving weekend brought us all back to reality. But instead, on Saturday they became heroes forever etched into the walls of Schembechler.: Hutchinson, Haskins, Ojabo, McNamara.

I went into the game Saturday thinking that we had a chance because this young coaching staff would know they couldn’t just impose their will and they had to scheme to beat out superior talent. I couldn’t have been more incorrect. Michigan lined up and did the opposite of what I would have wanted…they told Ohio State what they were going to do, and then they did it. And Ohio State could not stop it. Not even close. Both sides of the ball. The line of scrimmage. The backfield. The outside. The inside. Special teams. Saturday was not a fluke. Saturday changed the trajectory. The crew in Section 30 that have rode this out with me for nearly 30 years hugged and cried and stormed the field, feeling that rare feeling as Michigan’s 42-27 victory over Ohio State opened up a whole new world of opportunity, not for some time in the future but right here, right now. Somehow, this is just the beginning.

Michigan heads to Indianapolis to face Iowa for an outright Big Ten Championship. A win Catches 2003 and gets them in to the CFP where they will be 2 wins away from Catching 1997.