Victory in College Park

Last night when the Maryland women's basketball team won the national championship with a fantastic comeback, after Kristi Tolliver swished a huge, stone-cold-deadly 3-pointer to send the game into overtime, I leaned out of the window at 11:30 pm and yelled "Go TERPS!!" but heard nothing out there. So on a lark I got in my car and drove to College Park to see if they were destroying the campus. When I got close, there were all these cops out, and they had barricaded off Route 1 with flares and were diverting traffic into the campus. I ended up parking in some dormitory lot and hoofing it from there. I had a vague memory that the 'Vous and the Cornerstone were good campus bars. As I walked across the long greens it was quiet, but there were maybe 100 students who had gathered out by the big UM sign in front of the main green on Rte. 1, just hanging out and high-fiving pretty quietly. There was a helicopter flying low, circling around and around and around with a searchlight. I guess some kids had started burning a pile of garbage or something in the middle of the intersection of Knox and Route 1, near the bars, but it was extinguished by the time I got there. I counted 10 riot police in black SWAT outfits with helmets, shields and clubs, all lined up on one of the campus walkways, with what seemed like very little to do. If they were expecting the student body to erupt in violence and merriment, they were wrong; the kids were mostly just gawking at the riot cops, at least they were by the time I got there. The Cornerstone was pretty crowded and loud at midnight, with lots of kids in Terrapin red, but it seemed like it could have been any college bar -- though when the ESPN screens showed replays from the game, they all started whooping a bit. I'm not sure what I was hoping for -- I thought maybe someone would show up in a giant red turtle costume and we would all bow in a circle before him, and sing the Maryland fight song, which I don't know, or set fire to a building, or maybe I would drink a lot and climb up a roof or a flagpole with 127 frat guys and end up in the hospital. None of that happened; I just got a beer and had a smoke outside with a throng of kids who were so deeply intoxicated they appeared to have trouble remaining conscious.

I text-messaged Frank to see if he might want to drive through the barricades too, but he called back to say he was in Houston covering the Enron trial for the Post. At least I think that's what he said, through the pandemonium in the bar. I really thought Maryland's women's team had done something special -- they weren't favored to beat most of the teams they beat in the tournament, certainly not Carolina or Duke -- and outside among the throng I shook a lot of hands and offered congratulations. Many young women were outside shivering in little black tops with spaghetti straps -- it was like there had been a dress-code memo. I wanted to lend them my sweater, but I didn't, I just talked with whichever drunk guys were still awake. After a little while, I asked myself, "Why are you here, old dude?" and had no good answer, so I walked back to my car, looking for the trail of bread crumbs I had left. All the kids gathered at the campus front had dispersed, the riot cops had gone home, the helicopter had pissed off and the barricades were gone. Now if the University of Detroit had won the title, that would have been excellent mayhem.