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2001-01-01 - 11:59 p.m.

New Year's in shorts

New Year's Day I showered and put on shorts, walking outside into the bright and sunny Mesa morning. Courtenay expressed concern that we were planning on wearing shorts to the game that night, but we assured her we weren't. We just wanted to be able to say we wore shorts on New Year's Day ("We wore shorts on New Year's Day!").

Then she looked at us and said, "Are you mocking our winter?"

"Well, yeah," we said. Those Arizonans who live in the desert tend to think that anything below 75 degrees is cold.

Bryan and I returned to the Scottsdale hotel where our parents stayed and then he left with his folks to hit the self-proclaimed "World's Largest Tailgate Party," a $15-a-head carnival across from Sun Devil Stadium. I stayed with my folks and Jeff to have lunch at the hotel with another cousin of Mom's and Jeff's, Christine, and her family who came up from Tucson.

After lunch, Jeff went to Tucson with the others and we drove down to Tempe, where we walked from a few blocks south of the stadium to the party on the north side. Since the place is built into the surrounding hills, we had to walk a long way around the place to get there -- way more than the 155 yards of total offense Notre Dame would accrue in the game that night.

And that's all I have to say about that.

We avoided the $15 charge to get into the party since we arrived only 45 minutes before it closed, at 5:30. We stopped by the Notre Dame alumni tent, where beer girls served the drinks and the Rose Bowl played on TVs inside the tent. After half an hour of recognizing faces and forgetting names, we went inside for the game.

They wouldn't allow anyone to take beer out of the party, so Jess chugged hers at the gate, and -- as a result, I think -- proceeded to insult all the Oregon State fans as we walked the hill up to the stadium. "HALLOWEEN'S OVER!" she yelled at the orange-clad Beaver fans. "WHY ARE YOU ALL DRESSED LIKE PUMPKINS?"

I will say this: The Notre Dame Band was awesome. They did a great little dance routine to "Take On Me" during their halftime show. And the Big East referees sucked. Not that they've seen much good football this year, but I think they thought they were watching Rutgers out there. Not that it mattered. For anyone wondering, our seats were in the student section, just beside the tunnel to the Irish locker room. A large Fiesta Bowl banner with the two schools' football helmets covered it. We were there.

After the game, the plan was to meet our parents at Maloney's, a campus bar on University Ave. A guy I work with has a son who never returned home after graduating from Arizona State, and he was working when we walked in. We found a table in a corner, near three TVs and a Notre Dame Fiesta Bowl Coors Light banner. "I want that," said Laura Patterson, whom we'd run into on the way to the bar. I found Brian Henderson, the son of the guy I work with, and he took it off the wall and gave it to Laura.

We ordered pizza from next door (since the bar had closed the kitchen) and made friends with our waitress Stacey when we gave her a piece. She was the one who told us where to get it. When we'd finished, Bryan gave the bouncers the left-over half and they all acted like no one had ever been so nice to them before. We're just good bargoers, I suppose. When we walked in, the bar was pretty quiet, some recent western movie on the TV screens and the dialogue on the speakers. Then they started blaring Kid Rock and we looked for another table, one that was not beneath a speaker. We realized later that was how this place worked -- they interspersed movie and TV clips with the music throughout the night. They played the hilarious Patrick Swayze/Chris Farley Chippendale's sketch from Saturday Night Live, with its original soundtrack. The also played one particular fight seen from "Braveheart," set to "Hell's Bells" and another from "Blade" with different accompanyment. It was a clever touch.

Too drunk to return to Courtenay's in Mesa, Bryan and I decided to stay in Scottsdale. He went back to the room with his family, but I went back to the Scottsdale Princess with Laura, who was there with the University, and slept soundly in the king-sized bed inside the suite overlooking the golf course.

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