The ball was tipped. But I wasn’t in the stadium. Not yet.

The Iowa State women’s basketball team had just tipped off against Georgia in the NCAA tournament round of 32, a home game at Hilton Coliseum. All season, I had told myself that if Iowa State made it to this point, and earned a high enough seed to have a home game, I would be there. And I was, sort of.

At the same time, the Iowa State men’s basketball team was playing the final minutes of its own round of 32 game against Wisconsin. Just a few months ago, this had seemed impossible to imagine, but there they were just minutes away from the Sweet 16. My friend Chris and I stood in the Hilton Coliseum parking lot watching on an iPad. As the women’s game tipped off, I pulled it up on my phone so we could watch both.

Saturday, I had something more important to do than watch a football game.

We celebrated the life of my Great Uncle Derrill, one of the kindest, nicest people I have ever met in my life.

It was the end of the third quarter at Camping World Stadium in Orlando when we heard the first notes.

At halftime, the stadium announcer had encouraged fans to text their team’s nickname to a 5-digit phone number. Whichever team had more texts would get to hear their team’s song between the third and fourth quarter. For Iowa State, it would be Redfoo’s “Juicy Wiggle.’ For Clemson, it would be Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” The winner was a mystery, until those first few notes came over the loudspeakers.

It was unmistakably the Juicy Wiggle. The 15,000 – 20,000 Iowa State fans in attendance started dancing and clapping, many of them waving their cell phone lights. Despite the fact the Cyclones were losing 20-6, we still danced, more than 1,300 miles away from Ames.

I almost didn’t do it.

I almost decided not to go to the bowl game.

Bowl games bring unusual emotions in today’s day and age. They can mean nothing or they can mean everything. They can matter or they can not matter. It all depends on your perspective.

“What do we want?!!” my friend Eric yelled into the Jack Trice Stadium night.

Nobody answered. I wasn’t quite sure what we wanted. Iowa State was winning 41-14 in the fourth quarter against TCU. The outcome of the game was not in doubt. Everyone was in a good mood. The game had been pretty much everything we wanted it to be. The Cyclones were taking care of business. They were sending the most successful senior class in history out with a convincing win.

It was the kind of game in which a fan could afford to get greedy. We didn’t just want the Cyclones to win. We wanted to enjoy the heck out of every senior playing their final home game.

Every year toward the end of the football season, I start to get a little melancholy and nostalgic.

The season goes so fast. Even as a fan, it can feel like such a grind. Typically there are six or seven home games, which means six or seven Saturdays dedicated to little else besides tailgating and watching football. Even for the die-hard fans like me, it can get tiring. I still have to go to work Monday morning, not to mention do all the other responsible adult things like get groceries, cook dinner and pay bills.

And then the end of the season arrives, and it’s just over until next September. I find myself wishing I had another month to watch college football, and particularly my favorite team. I find myself wishing I had more games to attend at Jack Trice Stadium.

“So, have you enjoyed the journey,” my dad asked.

I had to pause. There were five minutes left in the second-to-last regular season game, and the last regular season road trip, so it was a fitting time to ask the question. Iowa State, however, had just given up a fourth quarter touchdown to go down 28-14 to Oklahoma. I wasn’t enjoying the journey very much at that moment.

It had surprisingly been a somewhat controversial week after ISU coach Matt Campbell told reporters it wasn’t his goal to win a Big 12 Championship. The Cyclones, the week prior, had given up almost all hope of that possibility in the loss at Texas Tech. As a fanbase, we seemed to collectively try to come to terms with the season that was, at the very least, not what we had hoped for. We wanted a Big 12 Championship.

Time to be honest for a second. The 2021 matchup with Oklahoma is not what I wanted it to be. It’s not what anyone hoped for at the beginning of the season. I had imagined, in the absolute best-case scenario, a 10-0 Cyclone team competing with a 10-0 Sooner team in the game of the year in college football. In lesser scenarios, I imagined Iowa State still having some shot at the College Football Playoff, and at least having a chance to get to the Big 12 Championship game. For all intents and purposes, those hopes slowly evaporated throughout the season, punctuated by the kick in the guts by Texas Tech just a week ago.

It's not the meaningful game we hoped for. It’s not the season we hoped for.

Winning at Oklahoma would still be a big, big step for the program.

The kick was in the air. It feels too good, I thought. Texas Tech fans began to buzz in anticipation. There’s no way this can happen.

A 62-yard game-winning field goal attempt was ripping through the air at Jones AT&T Stadium. There was every reason to believe this kick would be well short of the uprights, or that it would harmlessly zing wide left or right. Honestly, if I wasn’t an Iowa State fan, I probably wouldn’t have even entertained the idea in my mind that the kick could be good.

A few hours earlier, my friend Charles and I had arrived at the tailgate in Lubbock hosted by the Cyclone Club of Dallas-Fort Worth. We had almost immediately started a conversation with an Iowa State fan who lived in Dallas. One of the topics of conversation focused around the heartbreaking way Iowa State sometimes finds ways to lose games.

Editor’s Note: This post has nothing to do with football and will not be part of the book, but I wrote it on the airplane while flying to Lubbock and reflecting on the first game I attended in Hilton Coliseum since February 2020. I wanted to share it, and hope readers will enjoy it.

By the time the Iowa State men's basketball team played its season opener against Kennesaw State on Tuesday, it no longer felt novel to go to a live sporting event after the world began to open up. I had already attended nine Cyclone football games and a handful of other live sporting events.

Hilton Coliseum brought up a different set of emotions for me. It brought me back to February of 2020 and my last time in the stadium.

For Iowa State fans, Texas Tech doesn’t elicit the same kind of emotions as most other teams in the conference. It’s not an old Big Eight Conference rival that goes back 100 years. It’s not the big bad Texas Longhorns or Oklahoma Sooners. There haven’t been a ton of controversial or memorable games like when Iowa State plays Baylor or Oklahoma State or West Virginia. 

In my mind, any memories of playing Texas Tech in the past have to start with the 2002 game when a solid Red Raiders team came to Ames to face the No. 14 Cyclones. Iowa State was coming off an emotional win over Nebraska. Earlier in the season, Iowa State had taken storied Florida State, led by the legendary Bobby Bowden, to the wire in a first-game matchup at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. The Cyclones had also come back from a 24-7 deficit to beat the rival Hawkeyes in Kinnick Stadium. And, they were led by Heisman Trophy contender Seneca Wallace at quarterback. I’m in my 25th year of being an Iowa State fan, and up until 2020 this was the most excited I can ever remember being during a season. It felt like Iowa State had a legitimate shot at winning the Big 12 and playing for a national championship. 

That excitement would dissipate quickly in the weeks ahead, but not before reaching its peak in the game against Texas Tech. Early in the third quarter, with the game tied at 3-3, one of the most memorable plays in school history occurred. 

Breece Hall ran toward me. Well, at least in the direction of my seats in the southwest corner at Jack Trice Stadium.

I temporarily forgot everything else as I ecstatically joined 60,000+ fellow Iowa State fans in yelling as loud as I could. I turned to my friends around me and gave high-fives. One of them hugged me in celebration.

On Iowa State’s first possession of the second half, Hall had broken free. He zigged and zagged, making Texas defenders miss, and then ran all the way across the field to outpace defenders and sneak across the pylon on the goal line for a touchdown. It was a 47-yard run for Hall to give Iowa State the lead. After the extra point made it 10-7, “Juicy Wiggle” came on the loudspeakers and we danced. Thousands of fans shone their cell phone lights. I jumped up and down and waved mine. 

Texas is, quite frankly, a natural villain to pretty much everyone else in the Big 12. It seems like every year there is some version of controversy over opposing fans (and sometimes players) using the “horns down” hand symbol to mock the Longhorns. (If you are unfamiliar, Texas’s signature hand-signal includes putting a person’s index finger and pinkie in the air to make the hand look like it has horns.) Everything is bigger in Texas, including the whining.

Texas has the money, resources and recruiting base to make a lot of other schools jealous. Texas is a national brand name and is perceived to get the benefit of the doubt in most situations because of it. For example, in 2014 TCU and Baylor both finished 11-1 in the regular season, and both missed the College Football Playoff. There’s little doubt an 11-1 Texas team would have been in.

During the offseason leading up to 2021, Texas and Oklahoma decided to join the SEC Conference and leave their Big 12 brethren in a poor spot. While there was definitely ill-will toward Oklahoma for the decision, the majority of vitriol was aimed at Texas. For years it had seemed Texas got what Texas wanted. When the Longhorns had threatened to leave in prior years, others in the conference did whatever they could to keep Texas around (including allowing unequal revenue sharing that would benefit Texas and allowing Texas to shower games on its own television network.) After all that, Texas still decided to chase more dollars at the expense of schools like Iowa State.

I stood in Milan Puskar stadium in West Virginia in the fourth quarter, watching the replay on the video board.

“Touchdown!” I yelled and put my hands in the air.

Iowa State was losing 38-31 against West Virginia, but had just appeared to score a touchdown as Breece Hall powered his way through to the goal line. I hadn’t even seen the play as I was watching the replay from the play before: A 23-yard scramble by quarterback Brock Purdy to push the ball down to the 2-yard line. I was admiring his vision, toughness and resiliency as he put Iowa State in position to score the game-tying touchdown as the clock ticked toward six minutes left.

Let’s just get this out of the way. I don’t much care for West Virginia football. And that’s what makes me love this series.

Iowa State and West Virginia became conference foes in 2012 thanks to multiple years of conference realignment dominoes that resulted in longtime conference members leaving for what they felt were greener pastures, and the Big 12 snatching up TCU and West Virginia to stay relevant.

From the get-go, West Virginia felt like an outlier. Morgantown is a thirteen-and-a-half-hour drive from Ames, which is its closest in-conference destination. (The University of Cincinnati is set to join the Big 12, which will become the closest Big 12 school to West Virginia.)

There was something in the air on Saturday afternoon as Iowa State played the first half of its homecoming game against Oklahoma State. It was not something special, though, to borrow the words of Joe Tessitore from 2011. No, it was something else. Something like anxiety. Something like consternation. Something like frustration.

There were some good moments, but overall it just didn’t feel right inside Jack Trice Stadium as Oklahoma State built up a 14-7 halftime lead. It felt too similar to the games where I had watched OSU win the last two years, where it just didn’t look or feel quite like the Iowa State football team we expected to see. And after losing to Iowa at home, and losing the first Big 12 game to take away almost all margin for error in the conference title race, it felt troublesome.

That feeling changed in one moment in the second half.

An undefeated Oklahoma State team comes into Jack Trice Stadium on Saturday afternoon. We’ve seen this movie before, more than once in fact. And we’ve also seen a lot of other crazy things happen. 

The Iowa State vs. Oklahoma State series over the last 10 years leading into 2021 has been possibly the most memorable series the Cyclones have played. It’s not a full-fledged rivalry, but it has elements that have made it a compelling series since 2011.

The Cyclones are just 2-8 in that timeframe, which has coincided with the last round of conference realignment that resulted in the teams playing every year rather than two of every four years. The series has been anything but ordinary. Its featured thrilling wins on both sides, blown leads, plenty of controversy, one moment that changed the course of ISU football history and one game that changed the course of college football history.

It’s only fitting we start with that last one.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It can’t be real, I thought. There’s nobody around him! I was barely even conscious of the fact I had jumped out of my seat.

We had just settled in for the first play of Iowa State’s game at Kansas State on Saturday night. My wife, Paige, and I were in the stadium’s southeast corner, thirty-five rows up. Although there were a good number of Iowa State fans in the vicinity, we were surrounded on all sides in our immediate seating area by Kansas State fans. The row in front of us, behind us, and to each side. I told myself not to be “that guy,” the loud, possibly obnoxious guy that sits in an away team stadium and tries to outcheer the home fans. One of the first times I had gone to a road game as a non-band member, I had been “that guy.” I didn’t mean to be; I was just excited and cheering. It was only hours after the game, after reflection, that I realized I had probably been the annoying person that everyone around me was rolling their eyes at. I didn’t really want to do that again.

So on Saturday night in 2021 in Manhattan, Kansas, I was trying to mostly take my cue from the fans in my area. I figured I’d cheer a respectable amount when Iowa State had a big play, and other than that, try to blend in and be a good guest.

If you ever want to get just a little bit of a taste of what it’s like to be a rock star, join a college marching band. 

Sure, you may not think playing a sousaphone is all that glamorous, but for fifteen minutes or so before kickoff at a Cyclone home game, you are the star of the show.  

I think back to my time in the band. The memory of each game runs together, but I can still remember the overall experience vividly. 

It has been a long, mostly troubled road for Iowa State against Kansas State in recent years.

I consider the Wildcats to be Iowa State’s biggest football rival in the Big 12 Conference. This game doesn’t elicit quite the same strong emotions as when the Cyclones play Iowa, but it still stands a tick above other games in terms of how much I want Iowa State to win. In fact, the game has even taken on an unofficial rivalry game moniker: Farmageddon, named for the schools’ shared focus on agriculture.

The importance of the rivalry became more clear to me in 2012. I was working as a reporter for the Des Moines Business Record. That summer, before the start of the football season, we hosted a panel discussion that included then-ISU football coach Paul Rhoads. This was likely the peak of Rhoads’ popularity. The previous season, the Cyclones had pulled one of the largest upsets in college football history against the undefeated number two-ranked Oklahoma State Cowboys to make their second bowl game in three years.