I sat in an empty Memorial Stadium in November 2020, watching Indiana University play Michigan with maybe 200 essential personnel in attendance. The silence was eerie. No student section. No tailgaters. Just the echo of helmets colliding and coaches shouting into the void. Yet across Indiana, I knew tens of thousands of people were glued to their TVs, caring deeply about a team that had broken their hearts for decades. Even in isolation, even when everything else felt fractured, this still mattered.
That was when I started to realize I was missing something.
A year earlier, I would not have been there at all. I was the parent who had to be dragged to sporting events, the one who tolerated my wife's annual pilgrimage to Michigan games and could not understand why anyone would voluntarily watch Indiana football lose again. I played sports because my father made me. I liked skiing for the exercise, not the competition. Teams, standings, and rivalries never got under my skin.
That changed when COVID nearly ended college football.
As part of my work at Indiana University, I helped design the testing and safety systems that enabled IU and, eventually, the entire Big Ten to play. We were building the plane while flying it. The science was evolving. The risks were real. But what made it possible was not bravado. It was logistics. Lab turnaround times. Isolation protocols. Testing supply chains. And an unusual level of trust between athletic departments and public health experts.
The leaders I worked with were not looking for shortcuts. They wanted to get this right. Amid a moment when so many institutions were failing loudly, this one was quietly trying to work.
That effort drew me in.
My kids wanted to go to games. More surprisingly, they wanted me there with them. So I bought season tickets. At first, it was about being present. But even as IU kept losing, as the stadium emptied by halftime and the student section thinned out, I kept showing up. The losses started to hurt. The small wins started to matter. Loyalty, it turns out, changes you.
Then something unexpected happened. Indiana started winning.
On Monday night, I watched Indiana win the national championship. As the final seconds ticked away, I screamed until my throat was raw, tears streaming down my face, jumping up and down like a child. I hugged my family, then my friends, then complete strangers, all of us delirious with joy that felt both impossible and inevitable.
Tens of thousands of Hoosiers had made the journey. Alumni and kids, parents and grandparents. It felt less like a spectacle and more like a shared moment for a state that does not get many of them.
Now, when people learn I am from Indiana, the conversation changes. "How about those Hoosiers?" they say, and suddenly we are not talking past each other. In a country where so many interactions turn tense or guarded, this one does not.
That matters more than it might seem.
Sports are often dismissed as a distraction. But at their best, they are among the few places left where people still invest in something together, across age, politics, and background. They create shared rituals in a culture that is losing them.
We need this now more than ever. Social media algorithms push us into separate corners. Geographic sorting means we increasingly live among people who think like us. Political polarization makes even casual conversations feel like potential minefields. The pandemic physically separated us just as our digital lives were already pulling us apart. In this environment, it is easy to forget that we share more than divides us.
Watching the championship game, I saw people who probably disagree about everything else celebrate together in the same stadium, under the same rules, invested in the same outcome. Not because sports erase our differences, but because they give us a shared structure that makes those differences fade for a moment.
The public health work that first drew me to IU football taught me the same lesson in a different way. The systems that matter most are usually invisible until they are threatened. Testing networks. Reporting chains. Quiet coordination among universities, conferences, and health officials. None of it is glamorous. But it keeps the social fabric from tearing.
My family understood this instinctively. They knew that showing up matters more than the score. That commitment without an immediate payoff builds something real. I had to learn it, one cold Saturday at a time.
Indiana's championship is not just a sports story. It is proof that institutions can still work when people invest in them. That shared effort can still produce something joyful. That there are corners of American life where we have not forgotten how to belong together.
I never expected to become someone who plans weekends around games, who follows college players into the pros, who feels a genuine ache when the team loses and pure elation when they win. But I am glad I did. It brought me closer to my kids, my community, and a stubborn optimism that some things are still worth believing in, even when the odds are long.