Home and home away from home

Alex Holt
Saturday, October 15th, 2011

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might have heard that Fall Break’s coming up this week. While it’s not quite like the other breaks we get off at Ithaca College in that it’s shorter and we don’t have to leave our dorms, it’s still a good excuse to talk about what I like about being a sports fan at home and what I like better about being a sports fan at IC.

Here

• Interacting with other sports fans on game days and watching them interact-it’s always fun to see opposing groups of fans celebrate and/or commiserate before, during and after games. Most often during the fall, this happens on Sundays during NFL games but it can happen with baseball and hockey too. It’s fun watching your favorite team win but it’s also cool watching, say, Knicks and Celtics fans cheer or moan with every possession like they did last spring during Game 1 of their first-round playoff series.
• Going to Bombers football games-granted, it’s usually more fun when the team isn’t away for the better part of a month like they were before last week but at least you can be reasonably certain that when there is a home game, you’re going to want to stay around for the fourth quater.
• The big games-From both of the past two Super Bowls to the 20-inning Mets-Cardinals game in April 2010 to Roy Halladay’s NLDS no-hitter last fall to the men’s ice hockey gold medal game at the 2010 Olympics, some of the most memorable sporting events I’v ever watched have happened while I was right here on South Hill.

Home

• Watching Sabres and Bills games on a real live TV in my own house-Nothing against lounge room TVs or the ones in Campus Center Dining Hall but it is nice to be able to crash on one’s couch and just watch the game. As for hockey, it’s nice not having to rely on illegal Internet feeds or radio feeds that lag a couple full minutes behind actual game action.
• Reading the sports section and watching sports highlights on the local news-why yes I am 50 years old, why do you ask? In all seriousness, as an aspiring journalist, it’s nice to compare what you’re doing with what your local professionals are doing and to catch up on the sports news you just don’t always have as much time for when you’re in school.