The 88 Illini: #56-#53
Do you want to know the biggest shift in my life the last six months? No, it's not "my football team beat another SEC team in a bowl game and my basketball team went to the Final Four." It's being on campus once or twice per week when recording podcast episodes.
My wife and I moved to Champaign on in April of 2020. But for the first 4.5 years here, I only wandered onto campus (we're talking campus campus) maybe once every other month. I'd go to First and Kirby all the time, but that's not really campus. That's the athletic campus (or whatever we want to call it).
The podcast studio is in the Amory (the northeast corner of the Armory, to be exact) which means I'm parking somewhere on 5th or 6th Street and then walking to the studio. The thing you forget: just how many people there are on campus. Students, faculty, office workers - campus is non-stop, wall-to-wall people.
I only remember thinking that a few times when I was a student. And that was mostly when moving onto campus. I had lived for 18 years in a town of 7,000 people, I had graduated with a high school senior class of 176 people, and then I joined a freshman class of 9,000 (at the time - it's more now). So that was a big shock when getting to campus. I had been to downtown St. Louis many times for Cardinals games or whatever, so it's not like I had never walked streets with thousands of people, but it was still a shock at just how many people were going how many different places.
(I've told this story before, but when Brian and I moved into our dorm – I lived in Forbes with a friend from high school – the guys moving in across the hall invited us to go to Zorba's for dinner. Neither of us had any idea what a gyro was. Walking to Green Street that night was this big "oh my God are there 500,000 people here?" experience for me. Two kids in the "big city" – him growing up on a dairy farm, me a bit sheltered – eating some kind of pita pocket that wasn't pronounced like the word should have been pronounced. Take me back to the years where my eyes were opened daily.)
I graduated in 1996 and, for the most part, only returned to the "sports" part of campus in the following 25 years. And then, once moving here, I continued only going to that southeast corner of campus. These last six months, though, have felt like the early 90's for me.
A lot of people talk about how Green Street looks so different with all the high-rises, and it certainly does, but I'm here to tell you that when you're on campus, it still feels the same. The sidewalk along the north side of the Armory (along Armory Ave.) feels EXACTLY like it did in 1992. My wife and I went for a bike ride yesterday, and when on campus we took that bike path that goes between Foellinger and the undergrad library (currently being converted to something other than the undergrad library) and it all feels exactly the same. It's frozen in time for me.
When I'm walking that sidewalk between the English Building and Lincoln Hall, it feels exactly the same. I can tap into my emotions from 1994. College is when everything is supposed to be eye-opening, and I can sense that wonder when I'm on campus 30+ years later. On the podcast episode last week, Tom Michael mentioned class registration in the Armory and BOOM I'm transported right back to 1993. I love that so much.
And now I'm experiencing that once or twice per week. That weekly dose of campus has really changed things for me. It enhanced my Final Four experience (truly). I'm a fan because this is the school that somehow gave me a degree and seeing that school's logo on the official Final Four banners in Indianapolis hit me in that spot between the English Building and Lincoln Hall. There's something magical about it, and I'm so glad to have recaptured it.
I'd better get to the next four players here. I have to be at the podcast studio in 90 minutes. And I might take the long way to get there.
