The Hokie Spirit

I am going on my third week as a freshman at Virginia Tech and things, more or less, are settling down and taking on a normalcy. I wake up every morning with half an hour until my first class, get dressed, grab my computer and a granola bar, put my headphones on and walk out the door half asleep with the Goo Goo Dolls blasting in my ears. If I have any spare time between classes I will usually catch some extra shut eye; otherwise, I will begrudgingly put my headphones back on and trudge on over to my next class, the Goo Goo Dolls still playing. After classes, I will usually get a bite to eat from either Dietrich or Owens Dining Hall, or more often than not just head on back to the dorm and whip up some EasyMac. Seeing that I am majoring in engineering, I find I have little time to hang out on weeknights due to the enormous amount of coursework I have to keep up on. My studies have in a sense become my life.
However, while I may be preoccupied during the week, the weekend is a whole different story. While I, like many others came to Virginia Tech for the great educational opportunities, I can say without a doubt that we all came in part for the athletic events. When it comes to Saturdays in the fall at Virginia Tech, football is the order of the day, the main activity on everybody's calendar. And for the first time this past Saturday, I got to attend my first Hokie football game.

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and a beautiful day for football for the Virginia Tech Hokies. As game goers begin to assemble as kickoff time draws nearer, one would expect to see them adorned in the school colors of maroon and orange. However, today it is quite the contrary. Spring Road is not visible as a sea of people all decked out in white apparel weave their way ever closer to Lane Stadium. It's Tech's "White Out" game and also their home opener. The team has just come off a hard loss to East Carolina University in the previous week and the Hokie Nation is looking for redemption. The air is abuzz with thousands of conversations making things so deafening that you can barely hear your own thoughts. My friends and I jostle with others as we make our way through the crowd, as the Stadium, enveloped in glorious Hokie Stone, begins to take precedence over the scene in front of us. The two tiers of the West stands seem to climb taller as we approach our gate until finally we are so close their tops disappear and they are seemingly endless. As we proceed up the Southgate entrance and get our tickets scanned we are blasted and nearly knocked unbalanced by the wind channeling itself through the South and West sides of the stadium. Then, we climb our way to our seats. We climb, and climb, and climb, and climb, climbing so far that I wouldn't have been surprised to find myself on the moon. When we finally got to our seats, I laughed because we were in section HH and the seats ended after section II; it was the nosebleed section to say the least. Yet, the spectacle before us was fantastic. Not only could you see the whole stadium and everybody in it, but you could see the entire Virginia Tech campus and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the backdrop. As things got underway, you could feel the weight of what was about to happen. The Virginia Tech Corpse of Cadets freshman march into the stadium by platoons, filling the sidelines, as the cheerleaders start a back and forth call of "Lets Go" and "Hokies" between the East and West stands that makes the air reverberate with the voices of 60,000 people. After the National Anthem and Rendering of the Colors, Skipper, the game cannon, fired letting out a billow of smoke and sending an eruption through the crowd signaling the coming of the Hokies. Metallica's Enter Sandman begins playing as the Highty-Tighties and freshman cadets form two phalanxes around the Northwest tunnel entrance. VT's Marching Virginians lead the crowd in the "Blacksburg Bounce," and as the name suggests, everyone and everything begins bouncing with it. The Hokies finally run out of the tunnel and the place becomes a madhouse of whopping and hollering with chants here and there of "Lets Go Hokies" clap clap clap clap clap. As I cheered along with the rest of my fellow Hokies I couldn't help but think about the enormity of what I had experienced and that what happened in the game really didn't matter anymore.