When I was two years old, my preschool teacher was famous in my hometown for potty-training every kid in the class by the end of the year. How’d she do it? She put us on teams and made defecating “like a big girl” a game of intense competition. It worked because everyone loves rivalry: Cowboys v. Indians, Backstreet Boys v. N’Sync, Roe v. Wade, me v. Little Sally Sue in the after-lunch rush to the privy.
This weekend, Yale rivals Harvard. If you think there’s just nothing quite like a late November morning filled with face paint, chanting, hamburgers and Solo cups (or rather, vodka-filled water bottles shoved in your underwear), then read no further. You’ll have a ball.
But for all of you who are skeptical about the fun-ness or necessity of traveling to the crimson streets of Cambridge, for those of you who point out that “Harvard parties” is an oxymoron, for those of you who worry that you’ll just end up standing outside the stadium Saturday morning nursing a huge hangover, freezing limbs and wet pants because the whole vodka-in-your-underwear thing didn’t work as well as you planned — for you, Wikipedia, as always, has a solution.
When you Wikipedia “The Game,” several articles appear. The first is about the “gangsta rap” star called “The Game” who “gained notoriety for his feuds with other rappers” and named his son “King Justice.” He is irrelevant, except perhaps as an interesting soundtrack for the ride up.
The second article of the same search defines “an ongoing mind game” with three rules: 1. Everyone in the world is playing “The Game.” 2. Whenever you think about “The Game,” you lose. 3. You must then announce your loss to everyone around you and re-start not thinking about “The Game.” Under “criticisms,” Wikipedia adds: “The Game has been called pointless and has been known to infuriate some people.” This is either an extensively veiled metaphor which might explain why the Ivy League generally sucks at sports, or proof that “The Game” is not all about football.
Other Wikipedia articles reference The mind Game, The sex Game and The drinking Game. Simply insert your favorite activity between the two strangely capitalized letters and you have yourself a guidebook for a weekend of good times! Then, even if we lose The football Game, you can say to that crimson-wearing hottie from Harvard: “Sure, but who won last night…” and he’ll spend the rest of the day feeling that maybe he made a mistake in his choice of college. Victory for the Ole Blue!
If you still contest that anything called The Game is fun, just do what I did two years ago: steal a full bottle of Jack from a Harvard room, drink it all to forget your freezing limbs and temporary homelessness, streak across Harvard Yard for a fleeting moment of glory, break into a dining hall to eat cereal, fall asleep in a pile of bodies in a classroom with a flat-screen TV, wake up to crawl inside a suitcase for warmth, wake up again at 8 a.m. when lame-o Harvardians have a meeting in said classroom, spend 3 hours just sitting in a chair in Starbucks, stumble to the tailgate and never actually go inside the stadium until the last five minutes. Then, rush the field in your underwear painted blue. Have fun or no — you’ll get on ESPN.