A stroll around campus

 The best advice I have to offer these days I offered to an acquaintance of mine this week.

"Get there early," I told him.

"There" being the Notre Dame campus.

The occasion being Ohio State vs. Notre Dame in a great big football game beneath the watchful eye of Touchdown Jesus and the unblinking Eye of network TV and the eyes of a stadium stuffed to the aisles with fervent souls dressed in navy jerseys and other fervent souls dressed in scarlet-and-gray jerseys.

It's a rare-for-this-era meeting of top ten teams in Rockne's joint, and so you might presume I was advising this acquaintance to get there early because the traffic is going to back up to Elkhart. But that's not why.

I was advising him to get there early to ... live the moment.

Wander the campus, which is just beginning to take on its rustic autumn hue. Say hi to Father Sorin and Fair Catch Corby. Count the throwback Montana jerseys and Tim Brown jerseys and, yes, Archie Griffin jerseys; scan the bedsheet exhortations hanging from those ancient casement windows in those ancient fortress-like dorms; check out the gray-haired alums in their monogrammed ND shirts and green scully caps, wallowing in nostalgia beneath a fragrant cloud of grill smoke.

I used to do this every time there was a big football Saturday at Notre Dame, because there is nothing quite like a big football Saturday at Notre Dame -- or at Michigan or Purdue or virtually anywhere else, frankly. But Notre Dame with an Ohio State or a USC or a Florida State coming in, that was next-level stuff.

So I'd get there three hours before the kick and take the elevator to the pressbox and drop off my gear, and then I'd wander the campus for a bit. I'd do that to, yes, live the moment, because soon enough the moment would be gone and the next four hours or so would be about the job at hand.

The moment would be about stopping to recognize how extraordinarily lucky I was to be where I was and to have the job I had, and that I should be properly appreciative even when my laptop blue-screened me on deadline. And to note that there were a whole raft of memories I wouldn't have without my odd little pregame ritual.

One Saturday when the Nebraska Cornhuskers were in and still the Nebraska Cornhuskers, it was coeds strolling around in T-shirts that read Husk This. 

Another Saturday, in the flush unsuspecting early days of Bob Davie's run, it was looking up and seeing a bedsheet reading IN BOB WE TRUST drooping from one of those casement windows.

On several Saturdays I wandered into the Snite Museum of Art, hunkered down in the lee of the stadium, and did some culturing up. Visited the Grotto and all those points of votive light. Counted the visiting-team gear and caught snatches of conversation that confirmed what I often thought: That visitors came here not just in the rooting interest, but as tourists who always wanted to see what all that Rockne/Leahy/Touchdown Jesus business was about.

I trust they found out.