You may have seen that there was a football game scheduled yesterday. Well, more accurately there were several of them. You saw some of the early anxiety in the column last week after successfully ignoring the impact of new rules and conference allegiance. We do not claim to understand it, so this season has had trepidation and uncertainty. And hovering over that is the three-game suspension imposed on Big Blue’s dynamic coach Jim Harbaugh.

We have been in this position before, which is the curse of caring. We recall an old conference- maybe 1966 or ’67. It was held with family in the athletic fields of the secondary former religious college behind the family house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The discussion was a family yack dealing with the old teams and alliances. Remember them? They called it the Big Ten Conference back then for some reason. Now it may be a dozen or more. The family bond with the school in Ann Arbor was secure long before it was time to pick out our university. Aunt Rhoda had been a visiting nurse in Long Island during the Depression. She somehow parlayed that professional experience as an application in educational improvement.

She moved west from the New York Area to assist the University of Michigan in establishing a dedicated school of nursing. She was so efficient that she was named the First Dean of the new school in 1931 and remained there until 1972, the year before some of us graduated. Attending the University where she was part of the Administration leveraged her position for minor advantages on campus, in the administration and of course the famed sporting program. The records of her long service life (she lived 1891-1972) have been retained and divided into two series on Faculty Records and a Topical File on issues confronting an institution that joined the War effort in 1941 to support health care for young people in a global conflict.

In later years, in-state tuition made the ultimate decision on where to go to college was a no-brainer, but that lead to the hazards of over-enthusiasm. We do not attribute the emotion of the game to anything beyond pride of place in the conference. The rivalry with the Ohio State University Buckeyes hs come to be known simply as “The Game.” It is played annually between the Michigan Wolverines and the Bucks. The two teams are the winningest programs in NCAA Division I football history. Michigan notched the 1,000th victory in their football victory column last week, and that meant the magnitude of the game yesterday was magnified in fan hysteria.

This version of The Game had some historic aspects that would have determined the mood of Santa Clause for his holiday next month. We have lived through the streaks of victories and defeats. The Rivalry is every year and it has been played out more than a hundred times. They first met on the field in 1897, and the rivalry had been played annually and uninterrupted (with two exceptions) from 1918 until 2020. That was when emotion collided with contagion over the pandemic crisis. Michigan made an independent decision to defer play for the pandemic year of 2020. The game had been played at the end of the regular season since 1935 (except for 1942, 1998, and 2020).

Many of the Games determined the Big Ten Championship and the Rose Bowl participants. In the Millenium Year of 2000, the ESPN sports network declared the season-ending Big Ten game as the greatest North American sports rivalry ever.

That may be an understatement on the way we felt every year in the work-ups to the Last Game. It wasn’t the First Michigan-Ohio State game we attended was 1969, but our first as an actual student. There were 107,600 other fans there that afternoon, but it the Big House’s largest attendance record was 115,109, set on Sept. 7, 2013 in Michigan’s 41-30 night-game victory over Notre Dame. Keith Jackson, retired broadcaster for ABC Sports, is credited with popularizing the term we all used about the Ann Arbor stadium we called the “Big House.”

Here is the perspective on numbers: The Big House is the largest stadium in the United States and the third largest stadium in the world. The usual emotion was rising this year for a variety of understandable reasons. The rankings going into The Game had the Buckeyes at #2 and Michigan just one behind at #3.

Please don’t take this as more of the idle boasting that always attends the run up to The Game. We had had streaks of luck and enthusiasm and manufactured justifications for the three old outcomes: Win, Lose or Tie.

We haven’t seen the opinion pieces in the Sunday morning papers, but this being the 54th iteration of The Game, we have already worked out the possibilities in all previous years. We found a decent one this year that was never talked about before. We have mentioned that Mom grew up in a little town on the Big Brown River in the Buckeye State. The Ohio State University beckoned to her there in Columbus, since she would be the first in her family to attend University in America. Grandpa Foley served Ohio in the Fight for France, and his grandfather’s Irish generation served both sides in America’s Civil War.

So, we are proud of the century our family lived in the Buckeye State, and proud every time we manage to beat them. Or us, as the case may be.

The Game yesterday has all the elements with which we are familiar. The Wolverines took an early lead before a capacity crowd. The noise was loud, the way we remember it. The 4th Quarter had all the elements we recall from great disappointments. The game was close, and as the clock wound down, it looked like the Bucks might pull out the victory as the Wolverine lead hung by only a field Goal. But the Wolverines tightened up when necessary and locked up a trip to the Big Ten Championship Game .

There was a moment of disbelief that The Rivalry was safely put away for this year, but with more curiosities emerging. Having them come into the Last Game with both teams undefeated is certainly remarkable. With the Big Ten

(This is close to the student seating in The Big House where we watched thirty or so games in our time in Ann Arbor. It was always electrifying!)

growing to 18 teams over the next few years there will be new means of confronting the results of the Last Game of the Season. Why? Because this is no longer the last game and the league re-organization means there could be 15 games in this unusual year.

When the Bucks got the ball back with a minute to go in the 4th Quarter, we thought we might see one of those mazing come-backs for the Bucks. But as it turned out, no excuses were necessary. The interception that sealed the deal for Big Blue in front of the largest crowd in the largest stadium in a time of dramatic transition was pretty cool. We saw what happened and blinked in surprise. No excuses necessary. The Bucks fell and the Wolverines will face off against Big Ten West Champion Iowa, ranked at #17.

The Championship will be played on December 2nd. It will require some concentration here at Big Pink to keep track of it, since the game in not at The Big House but out at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana. We will go from there if we can nail the Hawkeyes and confront Georgia for all the marbles. Not that they play with them, of course. But this will be a year of new transitions and will blaze a new trail from here.

And there is that phrase heard down through the years that will keep us upbeat for the next two games. You may have heard it, and it is more appropriate than ever on this year of new traditions. “Beat Ohio State” will do for next year. It has worked before, and we mark yesterday’s victory with the hope we can do it again in Columbus next year!

If you are keeping track, the Wolverines enter the title game as 21.5-point favorites and are searching for their third-straight Crown. that has not happened since the Michigan stretch of six straight victories piled up between Bo Schembechler and Gary Moeller from 1988-92.

Since the current divisional alignment began in 2014, the Big Ten East is a perfect 9-0 against the Big Ten West. This also marks the sixth straight year the title game spread has reached double digits. This is the last iteration of the season final that evokes the old days. We start new from here!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
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