Collegiate Times

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The world had flipped upside down in a sports bar.

While surveying the pandemonium and wiping my eyes in disbelief, the Dolphins fans surrounding me high-fived over shocked and confused Red Sox hats and Brady jerseys.

After giving up on correcting my vision or breaking through the hallucination, I was able to make out a teal-clad friend of mine across the room and walked over to congratulate him as Ronnie Brown scored for the fifth time, dooming the New England Patriots to a 25-point home loss to Miami.

That's right, the team who'd won its last 21 regular season games just had its own building demolished by the hapless franchise that'd only given its fans one glimmer of victory in nearly two years.

Donning a vintage Larry Csonka jersey, he had me wondering whether the pinch-test wasn't working because I had, in fact, time-traveled -- it definitely would've explained the Dolphins running back scoring five touchdowns.

But no, this armor of past-glory had been worn down over countless years of mediocrity, all far cries from when Csonka took the hand-offs and legendarily helped plow Miami to consecutive Super Bowl victories in the early '70s.

Alas, this was long before the Tech senior wearing it was even a gleam in his parents' eyes -- Miami hasn't so much as reached the Super Bowl in nearly 25 years.

When I confronted him about whether this was the greatest day of his life, there in that Champs, 21-year-old Mike Mazonkey tried to sum up the long-elusive euphoria.

"You could tell me my cat died and I wouldn't care," he said.

Apparently he's learned all too well how to savor a victory week.

On the flip side, some 'Fins fans in Blacksburg aren't quite head over heels for their team yet -- or just not letting this off, perhaps out of anticipation for some sort of supernatural repercussion.

Heath Sorey, a Tech junior and employee of the Educational Media Company at Virginia Tech that owns the Collegiate Times, subscribes to this sentiment.

"I place higher priority on things, like school, than whether a team wins a football game or not," said Sorey.

Haha, I say. I decided to look deeper into his curmudgeon comment and recognized the larger phenomenon at hand. It seems that Miamifanis miserabiligus has evolved over the years.

Of course. How could this species survive so long without developing a good sense of pessimism about their team's general future?

Many others that I've questioned around campus reacted similarly -- and yes, there really are numbers of them roaming around Virginia Tech.

No, they didn't go extinct after Dan Marino retired, or during the Dave Wannstedt era, or when Nick Saban fled, or even after Ricky Williams decided he'd rather smoke weed than play for their franchise.

In attempting to pinpoint the single worst agonizing moment of his fandom, Sorey responded, "last season."

Last season was indeed a depressing one on the south Florida sports calendar, as collegiate counterpart the University of Miami missed a bowl game for the first time since 1997. This was not the case on Saturday, as Vice City saw a 41-23 win at Texas A&M of the revered Big 12.

The rest of the Atlantic Coast Conference followed suit, finishing 6-0 against out-of-conference opponents, including Atlantic Division doormat North Carolina State's upset of No. 14 ECU and Georgia Tech's 38-7 throttling of the Southeastern Conference's Mississippi State.

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