Postscript, Ohio State

When I was getting married in early 2013, I decided to center my bachelor party around an Illini game.

I’m not sure why – I guess I wanted to ensure that I saw a win – but I chose the Charleston Southern game in mid-September of 2012. We did win, my friends fed me warm mini bottles of Sutter Home wine throughout the game, I survived, and the Silver Bullet was a couple hundred dollars richer by the end of the weekend. Great success.

The best thing to come out of that weekend, though, was a tradition that’s carried on for a decade now. We decided that we kind of liked getting together for a weekend of acting like we were 18 again, and so a couple of us decided to go back for the Ohio State game in 2013. Spoiler alert: it was not a great success.

Like the Illini, we persevered. As the years went on, the tradition grew in size and in lore. Some years, like the Purdue game in 2014 and the Wisconsin game in 2021, were forgettable. Others, like the North Carolina game in 2016 and the Iowa game in 2022, still live on in our group chat.