Aloha Wins! (and my football heart grows three sizes)

I wrote previously about how I don't really get football and team spirit and blah blah blah.

I still don't get it. But I do apparently care. You see, over the weekend Aloha High beat Jesuit, 38-25. Which means absolutely nothing to almost everyone reading.

Aloha High School, home of the Hawaiian themed warriors even though Aloha Oregon has nothing to do with Hawaii, is where I attended High School. It's a decent school, some good teachers, good people, etc. But it is not known for good sport programs in general, and Football in particular. In my four years of High School, I'm pretty sure the football team only won one game. And that was a pre-season game, so it doesn't count. It was a truth universally acknowledged that the football team sucked. We still had the requisite pep rallies and half-hearted cheers, when the team was lucky. When the team wasn't so lucky, they would get what felt like the entire school shouting the opposing teams name after being asked "Whose going to win this game!" in a futile attempt to get us riled up by our endlessly optimistic Principal. We were a more realistic bunch.

And then there was Jesuit. Jesuit wasn't just a big, fancy private high school. They were also a sports powerhouse, to the point of almost being comical. Watching them face off against Aloha was like looking at   an inspirational sports movie with the loveable losers and the well-funded, lean, mean bad guys. Only crossed with a ritualistic slaughter. It wasn't just that the won everything, all the time, they were kind of jerks about winning. Oh, and they also lied about obviously recruiting. No one ever seemed to stand a chance, because any decent player was always swooped up by the machine.

They beat Aloha for 25 straight years. Not they we were special, we may have lost the worst, but they usually dominated everybody. Every now and again another school would somehow manage to steal away the district title, but they had still managed to keep the thing for six straight years.

And then on Friday, before probably a crowd of 5,000 (I seem to recall games being lucky to get a few hundred, and most of them were there for the marching band) Aloha beat Jesuit. By a lot. I didn't even know the game was happening, didn't think I would care even if I'd known. But when I heard the news, I was smiling and fist pumping without really knowing what I was doing.

I'm still inexplicably happy about this. This has nothing to do with me. I obviously wasn't playing the game or even in attendance. I graduated six years ago. Even when I was a student I took pride in not caring. But even though logically a big win by some teens who play at my former high school doesn't have anything to do with me, it sure feels like it does.