Purgatory and Commonwealth

How many Virginia Tech students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 3. 1 to screw the thing in and 2 to mention how much better they did it than UVA.

You can replace Virginia Tech with NC State, UVA with North Carolina, Auburn and Alabama, so on and so forth. There are games with understandable, friendly rivalry, the sort of games where you understand that at the end of the day, the game is won or lost and you fall asleep in the same bed. The name usually reflects these. The Commonwealth Cup between Virginia Tech and UVA is this sort of game; all hard feelings aside, a loss destroys two to three days, tops. Some games take on an apocalyptic name; any game called Farmageddon is, despite the meaninglessness of it to anyone not attending Kansas State or Iowa State, serious business.

But above the rivalry games, there is the bowl. The bowl has an odd significance, a sort of Geiger counter of where your team is. Rising programs thirst for bowls. But for the above-average program, there is nothing as purgatorial, frustrating, and flat-out blue balls afflicting. Like an overbearing mother, all they remind one of is what could have happened had a snap gone differently. The purgatory comparison rings especially true in the South, where football is religion.

Once again, the Virginia Tech Hokies, my team of choice, have underperformed. The Hokies live a sort of double life; throughout the country, they’re a good team, a perennial ACC favorite, the dynasty team in an okay, good-to-not-great conference. But in Southwest Virginia and the hearts and minds of their fans everywhere, any win just portends rain; any broken record is a schoolchild’s Sunday before the fumble of a Monday. There are times they look cursed, and then there are times they just can’t get out of their own way, times when they look lazy, and then times when we really sit back and wonder, “Is God a Cavs fan?” The Virginia Tech Hokies are a secret member of the Blue Ball Allstars, the sixth man, the team’s glue guy, the Michael Cooper to the nineties and aught’s Braves' Magic Johnson. To that modern-day Southwest Virginian region, the Virginia Tech Hokies are true heartbreakers. Non-Virginians might debate that Virginia isn’t Southern enough, but these people have either never been to Virginia or wear seersucker in the fall.

So why do we cling to this disappointment? Teams take on the spirit of a region: Look at the Pros. The Lakers are flashy and glamorous, the Larry Bird Celtics were grimy and white, and the Detroit Pistons were tough and didn’t have a real shining star other than Isiah Thomas. This disappointment is something familiar to anyone who makes a well-intentioned, well thought out argument, only to have the retort be, “Where are you from?” and then to be asked if they’re familiar with the post-modern concept of running water. The Hokies understand our pain; understand what it is to have people not understand that you can talk like a Beverly Hillbilly but think on the level of any Woody Allen hero -- their pluckiness sustains us.

No one asks the team if they wear shoes when the twang slips out of their mouth, when they pronounce “Time” as “Tahm.” The Hokies remind us, deep down, that as far as we’ve come, terrible things still go on in the region, that there’s a rampant prescription drug problem, that the stink of racism hasn’t washed entirely from the region, that no matter how eloquently you can describe the smell of rainwater, no matter how advanced your understanding of economics or Soren Kierkegaard is, no matter how fast you can do a math problem, deep down, there’s a small section of people that will believe the flatness in your speech is a line-graph of your IQ. This is the spirit they exemplify: the subtle disappointment of meeting people who are progressive in all of their politics except their feelings about the South.

But instead, the victories, the numbers, the national television appearances, the times Lee Corso or whatever talking head they’ve awakened from death, injected with amphetamines, and caked with make-up says, “Are the Hokies legitimate this season?” make us realize deep down, that for all of our bad qualities, for all of our cousins who think Obama’s a Muslim, that there will always be people who value hard work, good manners, and kindness. And it doesn’t matter what region they’re from, because they won’t care what region we’re from, Sugar, Orange, Chick-Fil-A Bowl be damned.