A few years ago, I took a friend to the Red River Shootout. He had gone to school at Morgan State and really wasn't into football. The games had always been sparsely attended, and they weren't exactly a campus event that you just had to go to.
We had pretty good seats, about the 45 yard line some two-thirds the way up on the east side. But, everyone was cheering, and there was a show of a type that he had not seen. He had heard that the Red River Shootout was the second biggest party in the US from a Life or Look Magazine article about 1955, the biggest being Mardi Gras. He had seen the parties the night before. But, he was just not prepared for the enthusiasm of the game. One side cheered. Then, the other side cheered. As I remember, OU won by about 21.
But, he was so excited by the game that he got into the cheering. He could have cared less about OU or Texas. But, he was captivated by the spirit of the game. By the end of the third quarter, I was trying to find hot coffee to quell the soreness in his throat as he had yelled so much that he was completely hoarse. He was jumping up and cheering, and he didn't even care about OU or Texas. He was completely into the flow of whatever the crowd was doing. After the game, he said that it was the biggest spectacle that he had seen, and he had been to two Army/Navy games and several inaugurations. He was too excited to make sense after the game.
And, we show up flat?