Like many other Yalies, I pretended to be incredibly, unprecedentedly and obscenely excited to watch The Game, since football is my favorite sport ever. (Go … blue? (We probably say that, right? Or maybe we say “Old Blue,” for like, Yale?)) Now, however, (and I’m *crying* on the couch as I write this) I will no longer be able to sit in twenty degree weather and watch twenty college boys run around playing a sport I neither understand nor, to be honest, enjoy.

What changed? Why can’t every Yalie cheer for “Old Blue” this year? Because tickets sold out at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and at 1:00 p.m., I was too busy enjoying my Kitchen Sink Cookies to leave the dining hall and get in line. It was also thirty degrees. And finally, as you may have gleaned from the previous paragraph, I do not actually like football. So, after several texts that described the line for tickets as “over an hour long,” I contentedly dunked what was probably my fifth cookie into a glass of milk and I resolved to spend the weekend exploring Boston, maybe becoming a Hip Big City Girl in the process.

I was settling down to Google trendy thrift stores in Cambridge, and wondering whether anything near Harvard could possibly be trendy, when it started. Traumatized by the long wait outside of Payne Whitney, friends and acquaintances bombarded my phone with desperate and arbitrary group texts. “DJD U GT GME TCKTSz!1!” was one message, written painstakingly by frostbitten fingers. “Must game” reads another, sent to twenty numbers, six of which I don’t know. And then, “NO U?” “NO ” “CRYING” from at least four people per group, most of whom had probably, earlier that day, complained to their friends, “I don’t even, like, want to go to The Game! I don’t even like football! LOL WHY AM I GOING LOLOL HARVARD SUCKS LOL!” These same people were now reduced to (frozen) tears when they couldn’t find tickets. (A record number of Yale students purchased them this year.)

Anyway, given all that, I almost threw my phone out the window, before thinking to myself: It will probably get better tomorrow! And, of course, it didn’t. At lunch, my friend told me he bought tickets for a hundred dollars online. I lol’d. He said, in all seriousness, “Yeah, it’s a little expensive, but I’ve never made it to The Game before. I was too drunk last year.” Hopefully he’ll manage it this year, but I suspect those hundred dollars may go to waste. Indeed, even my suitemate Ydna Gineok ’16 has reactivated his Facebook for the SINGULAR purpose of obtaining Game tickets through friends (but probably actually “Free and for sale.”)

This anxiety is so palpable that even I (I!) am becoming nervous. What will I do at Harvard? In Boston? What if I can’t find trendy thrift shops and I’m stuck doing random things in a city that is, to be frank, New York’s weird and conservative cousin? If I hadn’t already bought bus tickets, I probably wouldn’t go at all. I don’t want to attend stupid mixers; I’m already scared of Yale people, I can’t imagine talking to Harvard kids. Nor do I want to go to my friend’s random a cappella concert, or even my own random slam poetry show. And I’ve seen “The Social Network” — I know you have to be either a Kennedy or Mark Zuckerberg’s cooler younger brother to get into Harvard parties. So, the question remains: What am I doing? Why am I getting on that bus?

Here’s an answer: part of me (okay, most of me) feels that I should support Yale this weekend in Boston. Even if I don’t go The Game, I’ll be cheering “Old Blue” in spirit.