Around 4:00 this afternoon, I looked out the window of the building where I work and watched a couple of guys standing on the sidewalk, huddled around a grill drinking beer. Nearby, one of the parking spots had another grill…this one blazing orange flames. My coworkers had almost all fled. The campus was closed, and the stadium was open.

I’ve never been a sports fan, but I did develop a fondness for the Wolverines. Maybe one day I will feel a similar fondness for the Hokies, but right now I have a hard time believe that day will come. When I was in high school, a lot of my friends applied to VT, and all I could do was laugh at them for choosing to attend a school whose mascot was a turkey. A turkey? You can call them the fighting gobblers all you want, but when you get down to, you’re talking turkey. And Hokie? How hokie! (Have I said this all before here? I’ll probably say it again.)

Every now and then VT has a home game on a Thursday evening. All the non-essential workers get kicked out of work an hour early. I guess that’s not so bad, but it is sort of creepy how it happens. I could feel the tension as my coworkers tried to finish up so they would make it outside to move their cars before the tow trucks came by. The word was, if your car wasn’t gone by 4:15, you’d be walking home. It was like that episode in Buffy where Cordelia wishes Buffy never came to Sunnydale and so Sunnydale gets taken over by vampires and all the school kids have to run home so they aren’t caught outside after dark.

“Run, run! They’re coming!”
“But I dropped my lunchbox!”
“No, don’t stop! Don’t turn around! They’re coming!!!”

But I wasn’t afraid. Nope, not me. I was a Sunnydaler with no blood, or in this case a VT employee with no car.