March 3, 2007
Saturday
We didn’t come here to lose!
              — slogan on the back of a popular ‘Ville Hoops t-shirt
Millersville 65, Edinboro 55!
Go here for the sports story. The fiction writer’s gallivanting story follows.
We started out from Harrisburg yesterday morning at about 10:15. If you ask Ron, that was fifteen minutes late. If you ask me, well, I’ll tell you it was the best I could do given the impromptu nature of the trip.
The town of California is almost a straight shot west from Harrisburg, nearly all of it via the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a well-maintained, uncluttered toll road. The terrain from Harrisburg out to about Shippensburg is the familiar dairy cow country (always described as “rolling farm land”) of the eastern part of the state. Something changes then, a quality in the air and the color of the light, and the words “rugged” and “sparse” seem apt to describe the geography. About two-thirds of the way you’re south of Johnstown and driving into and through the mountains (literally, via a system of tunnels) rather than around them, and you’re in the “higher elevations” that the weather reports always mention when giving snowfall estimates.
The trip took exactly three hours and fifteen minutes. We stopped first at the Holiday Inn in Belle Vernon, on the eastern bank of the Monongahela River and nine miles north of California. I’d chosen this hotel from the list provided at the university’s visitors’ site. It’s a brand name, moderately-priced, so you can be assured of few surprises.
It turned out to be on a little strip of road off Route 906. Its next-door neighbors were the Knotty Pine Motel and the Relax Inn, both of which looked like they’d been fashioned from the outbuildings behind somebody’s low-slung ranch house. A hotel review site described these places as having “private bathrooms and other amenities.” A private bathroom is an “amenity”? While it’s true that this trip afforded little time to use the Holiday Inn’s “amenities” (pool, fitness room, free premium movie channels), it did have a particular focus that limited my spirit of adventure to traveling to a new city to support my team. Checking out a funky Mom-and-Pop motel is best left for another time.
We settled in, had a sandwich in the Holiday Inn’s dining room (where paramedics were trying to persuade one member of a group of lunching “red hat ladies” to allow herself to be taken to a hospital where the reason for her momentary collapse could be investigated), and then left for the campus of California University. Our game was scheduled for 5:30. I’d tried to reserve tickets by phone, but learned they were available only at the door, which would open at 4:00. This is a championship game, I said. We need to be there early.
We needn’t have worried. There were hardly more fans there from our opponent, Edinboro University (two hours north) than from our contingent. And there were probably fewer than a hundred of us Millersville Marauder fans, including only five or six of the “Pucillo Posse,” Millersville students who dress in black and gold, paint their faces, wear wigs and pirate accessories, and provide the core energetic cheering section (the ones whose “energy” doesn’t get them ejected before game’s end) at home games. We sat with our friends behind the bench, talked over the loud music for an hour, cheered our team’s official entrance and introduction, and settled in for the game.
It was a nail biter, 24-24 at the half. Things got better in the second half, although we in the stands never relaxed, because, as we all know, it ain’t over till it’s over.* (That’s the most actual sports reporting you’ll get from me. I told you to go elsewhere for that!)
Afterward we went to a pizza place on the main street of California. There were two other patrons there when we arrived, and two more wandered in while we were there. (This is a pizza place with a beer license on the main street of a college town on a Friday night. California can best be described as “sleepy.” A young friend who has visited the place used the term “podunk.”) We fell into conversation with the young woman cashier, who commented on my ‘Ville Hoops shirt. It turns out she’s from a school near where we live and played field hockey against Lynn. (It was her team that knocked us out of the playoffs when Lynn was a junior.)
The victory means that Millersville will play Cheyney University (the winner of the second game, against the home court California Vulcans) tonight for the PSAC championship. It had been our intention (well, Ron’s intention) to return home this morning and listen to the championship game, if we were in it, on the radio. Now what kind of adventure is that?
Through powers of persuasion I didn’t know I had, I have convinced Ron to stay for the championship game tonight. That means we have to find something to do all day (not a problem for me, since I am rarely bored). We’ve negotiated a late checkout with the hotel, but we still need to find something to do from that time (3:00) until game time (7:00).
We’ll manage.
More later.
*Words attributed to Yogi Berra, who also allegedly said, “You can observe a lot by just watching,” a sentiment that characterizes my role at events like this.