For around 13 years, Sundays were Chargers days.
Wake up around 11 a.m, throw on the powder-blue jersey, grab a California burrito, and plop down in the love-sac in front of my family’s flat-screen TV.
Sunday at 1:15 p.m. was a sacred time.
And now, two years into college, it’s just another minute in just another day.
The Chargers game is background noise ““ if it’s on.
Last weekend’s nationally televised Sunday Night Football event against the Patriots was a big deal to Bellichek-haters back home. But to me, it was a catalyst for a realization that I should have come to a long time ago.
The realization? Going to college shoved the “home team” to the back seat.
That’s not to say we don’t tout our NFL jerseys around campus. There’s a certain amount of pride that comes with repping the hometown team at your home away from home. At UCLA you may very well be the only Cleveland Browns fan within a 50-mile radius of Royce Hall.
But as a UCLA student, I’m a Bruin fan first. It’s UCLA, a gaping black hole, and then everyone else.
And when you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.
Allegiances to sports teams are shaped largely by the notion of community. I was a Chargers and Padres fan for the last 13 years for the simple reason that I lived where they played. San Diego, like any other city, is a community, and it was my hometown.
Of course it’s natural to have love for your hometown and root for the team that represents it. It also helps when everyone around you is from the same place and cheers for the same team with you.
The thing is, college is a much more intimate community than the city of San Diego. UCLA’s campus stretches a number of miles I can count on one hand. San Diego County’s surface area requires a calculator. UCLA’s community size consists of around 40,000 reasonably similar students, within the same age bracket, working through the same stages in life.
Needless to say, San Diego’s residents are not so similar.
And there’s one other little bonus that makes us so much more drawn to our college teams. It may be cliche, but we literally do sit in class with some of the athletes on our sports teams. They may not all be Darren Collison, but it’s cool anyway. In one 20-person English class, I discussed “The Yellow Wallpaper” with what felt like half the track team. Now when I see them out at Drake, I’ll root harder for their success than I ever would for LaDainian Tomlinson.
And while we all have pride in our hometown, and as a result our hometown team, a different, often more passionate pride is held exclusively for our college team. We all picked UCLA over other schools, and with that selection comes intense, almost egotistical feelings. Every time our school is successful in anything, we are too.
Of course, when the Dodgers go to playoffs, it makes sense that the people native to this area throw on their blue ball caps again. All it takes is a little success to revive our love for the home team. Naturally, I’ll root hard for the Chargers if they make the Super Bowl, and that game surely won’t be background noise.
But our school is in our blood, to a degree that our hometown never can be. Life makes us move around and change what we call our hometown. Jobs and family take people places they never thought they’d be.
Twenty years from now I may find myself in Nashville, rooting for the Tennessee Titans.
But regardless of where I go, I know for sure that the seal on my diploma won’t change.
If you work on chemistry problems on Sunday while the game is on, then e-mail Stevens at mstevens@media.ucla.edu.