I Finally Got To See A College Football Game!

Living abroad as we do, whenever we run into some other expats, the conversation invariably turns to the same topic: "what do you miss from home?" After mentioning the super-obvious (friends and family, duh), we occasionally wax rhapsodic about Portland being a foodie heaven with an ample supply of wine shops and world class bars; sometimes we'll get misty about our quasi-pet, the neighbor's cat who ended up spending all of his time at our place, but a lot of the time it's the little things, the touchstones of home-- comfort foods like a decent (and bottomless!) cup of coffee, late night runs to both Zien Hong and the sinful goodness that is the 24-hour, 365-days open Sesame Donuts (breathe there a man with a soul so dead that he would not cast his eyes upon the perfection that is their Chocolate Old Fashioned and declare "by God, THAT is a donut!"). Like I said, the little things.

But I really missed my Saturday tradition of watching college football on the TV from 9:00am 'til whenever. I was blessed to have a very understanding wife who knew my love of the game, and put up with bouts of occasional fanboy screaming at the TV for hours on end. But with the move and the exorbitant cost of cable TV here, it simply could not happen (to get ESPN Europe, you would have to pay a king's ransom, and even then, you would be locked into an ironclad 1-year contract, and only get a sliver of the "regular" US programming, so the idea of spending over 1400 Euros to see maybe 20 football games all year was a bit of a non-starter). Slingbox, the darling technology of the expats, works only if you have a confederate back home with both cable TV and super high-speed internet connection... who wants to watch the same exact programming at the same time. So I suffered in silence, watched the scores update themselves every 60 seconds on Yahoo Sports, maybe caught an occasional online radio broadcast of a game that wasn't blocked (legally, you have to block these things from international listeners, but sometimes stations forget to switch on the jammers)-- hardly a dynamic evening.

As they say in Indiana, sometimes even a blind pig finds an acorn. I was tipped off to a likely extralegal website that rebroadcasts sports games on the internet, and holy cow, it actually worked. So the first college football game I saw in over 13 months happened to be my alma mater Purdue (the best 3-5 team in college ball, baby!) beat the woeful Fighting Illini of Illinois, followed by a stream of other games-- I hate to admit it, but I was up until 3:00am this morning watching football, seemingly trying to make up for lost time. It was great. All I needed was a donut to make my evening complete, but you can't get everything you miss in the same evening.