For Emma McGill (COL ’08), it was a junior-year game for her club soccer team.
“A really proud moment for me was when we lost 2-1 to Virginia. They’re an amazing team with a huge selection of people to draw from. They hold tryouts for over 300 girls,” she says. “Us, we used to not even have a real team. Anybody who wanted to play could play every game, and we were completely unorganized. We had won before, but that was a big moment for us – to do so well against such a big state school.”
For Adam Persing (COL ’08), it was a contest that signaled good things to come for Georgetown men’s basketball.
“I think my absolute favorite memory is freshman year, beating Notre Dame and rushing the court,” he says. “It wasn’t so much that it was such a fantastic win, but when you’re down, you take what you can get. That was a defining experience for me. I really enjoyed watching the program rise from humble beginnings to where it is now.”
For Lisa Rodriguez (MSB ’08), it was a club rugby match from sophomore year.
“We’re sitting there in freezing cold weather to cheer our friend on, and finally he gets called onto the field for his moment of glory,” she remembers. “I think he was on the field for two minutes, not even, and he gets tackled and is just not moving off the ground. He is in a fetal position on the ground. They’re playing on top of him. They can’t stop play. And all we can do is scream, `Roll off the field! Just roll!'”
I didn’t ask these seniors what their favorite Georgetown sports moments were. I asked them what their favorite Georgetown moments were. And after four years of studying and sightseeing and carousing in our nation’s capital, the stuff of the sports field happens to be what sticks most in their minds. But why?
“It’s such a central part of everything,” Rodriguez says. “You go to the sports games, and you don’t even have to be interested in the sport, but you go to cheer on your friends or cheer with them. I never used to care about basketball, but I go because my friends are going, and when you do that, you feel like you have a lot more invested.”
That’s the thing about sports at Georgetown. Not everyone loves them for what they are. But they provide a forum for all of those feelings that are almost always beyond reach in day-to-day life. Duke’s Sheldon Williams rebounding a ball with a three-point deficit, the clock ticking down from six to five to four, J.J. Redick looking poised to tie a game Georgetown had worked tooth and nail to put of reach – how can a person not gasp or faint or shriek? And when that ball breaks loose and Brandon Bowman pounces on it, who’s the first person you turn to to share in the moment of disbelief? It’s the friend right next to you.
We didn’t see it coming when we were freshmen. We didn’t think these sorts of trivialities would define our lives at a big-name university. Neither do those teeny-bopper members of the “Georgetown Class of 2012” Facebook group – you know, the ones who are coming here to maliciously take our places. Out of all those obsessive-compulsive postings about orientation packets, NetIDs, waitlists and the differences between GUGS and In-N-Out burgers, not a single one is devoted to how great it will be to watch Greg Monroe play basketball next year. They’ll learn soon enough.
What those future freshmen don’t know is that boyfriends or girlfriends won’t be the only thing to command unreasonable attention or the only thing to break their hearts. We revolve around athletic pride at Georgetown. We made fun of our freshman orientation advisers for their penchant to break into the Fight Song, when in fact, we ended up evolving into them. During sophomore spring, “We Beat Duke” posters were more common in apartments than fire extinguishers. At Senior Convocation, the arrival of Roy Hibbert drew more cheers from our parents than our own entrances.
Would that ever happen at Princeton?
Ultimately, it will be our shared sports experiences that tie us together in the future. In sports bars all across the country, a moving ball on a basketball court in March will prompt Hoyas of varying backgrounds to unite, scream and tell stories about their past. Intertwined with all those sports memories will be the ones that are really worth remembering.
y fondest reminiscence is of a sports bar in Paris so filled with Georgetown students that a bartender was compelled to download, and blast, a copy of the Fight Song. But I’ll wax sappy no further. In four years of writing in these pages, I’ve avoided it at all costs, and I know I’d regret it once the sentiment of graduating has passed.
What I can’t get out of my head, though, is one other memory: a Washington Post reporter’s line that the best sports stories are the kinds whose content verges on the meaning of life. It sounded funny, even a little melodramatic, at first. But considering all we’ve seen and felt together over the last four years, those seem to be the only kinds of sports stories there are. I’m grateful to everyone who made them so much fun to watch, and to tell.
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