2013 Reservoir Uprights

March 2013. 

The Lieutentant Colonel was no fool. He heard what we all heard in the week leading up to the game. And he made it very clear that should the Corps tear down the goal posts in the event of a victory, there would be consequences. Severe consequences. That was his job. To manage. To control. To ensure the professional conduct of the U.S.C.C... and to do that he ensured consequences.  These were reiterated several times. Made emphatically clear. Hours and boards and official inquiries and punishment would await any Cadet who tried to touch the uprights.

And we stood, shoulder to shoulder, through that long afternoon, bitter in our wool pants, subdued as always.  The Firsties had yet to see a win. Four years of football. Four years of March-ons and drill and hours spent standing in rain and sun, racked and stacked in Michie like so many sardines to watch defeat. Four years of disappointment, a length of time only augmented by endless ticking nature of interminable days of the Point, a length of time that is only understood by the Corps.  

In the fourth quarter we were still leading, but we were wont to blow it anyway, so we braced, not for victory, but for the imminent disaster, the salt in the wound that was Army Football Fourth quarters, a sad curse which continues to this day, and which, on that day, we suspected would be no different. 

The Colonel watched. And the squad of MPs around the posts watched. And we watched. All of us watching. Not daring to speak as superstitions ran deep. We all watched together as the clock ticked down and our lead remained... and remained... and remained until there were only seconds left... seconds... and there was no way we could lose... And we realized it but we did not speak it. It was an Awakening of consciousness to the Fact that we were going to win. And suddenly you could feel the energy, the pent-up fuel of a thousand stressors bulging and splitting, like ripples, like fire, across the stands. We could feel it. And Colonel felt it. And he thought of his mandates and his address and the official emails promising reprimand and would it look professional or not and the clock ran out and someone must have been the first to make a move, but all followed, and we were storming the field and we were leaping over the barriers and everyone in white over grays, we were all just faces in the mob, protected by the uniformity, all consequences would be communal now and so no one cared for the boards or the hours and someone grabbed the base post and hands were joined and the others climbed up on the cross beam and rocked back and forth and some even further, up the uprights, leaning, pulling, a hundred hands tearing at the metal that shook and shook and even as I reached the green somewhere in the mob I saw the far uprights tilt like schooner mast, dying like a mastodon swarmed by a hungry tribe they did tilt, tilt and fall and the cheer as they came down was a roar to fuel the crowd, a bellows from somewhere primal and then we at the near goalpost and the MPs could do nothing for we were so many and it was rocking and rocking and popping and then out. Out and down and then up and up on the shoulders of the mob and everyone was screaming and yelling and smiling as it was carried and torn apart at the corners and the pieces carried and madness was everywhere at once and wonderful. 

I heard that one went straight into the reservoir, but I never saw it. They carried it out of the stadium and fed it, fresh and yellow, a sacrifice to the deep green pool. But did not see that, so I cannot say it was so. I was in the procession down the hill, in the company of the fragments of the second post. And I remember, clear as day, looking up over my shoulder at a red-faced, ecstatic Lieutenant Colonel, lifted aloft, silouhetted against the sky, riding upon the yellow goalpost as it was carried down the hill, down past the Church, down past the foundations of the new gym until it turned the corner into North Area and was lost forever in the bowels of the Corps.