Pokin' Around Laramie

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As with most of us in 2020, I wasn’t sure how things would turn out after all the pandemic and election nonsense derailed us for most of this year. One place I certainly didn’t expect to end up was Wyoming, but I nevertheless find myself in this great state for only the second time in my life. This trip has given me several firsts, and perhaps a minuscule claim to 2020 fame: I’m fairly confident that no other person outside of the ESPN world has attended a college football game this season for every conference that has permitted fans to attend. My game this week was at Wyoming, and it was my first snow game as well as my first game in the Mountain West Conference. (Which means I’ve now attended games in 2020 at ACC, Big 12, SEC, AAC, C-USA, Sun Belt, and MWC schools. Know anybody else who’s done that? Me neither.)

Tickets for this game went on sale on December 1, and I snagged one as soon as I could. That was a good call, since the state of Wyoming received further pandemic restrictions a few days later, which meant that the school stopped selling tickets to the game. Attendance was limited to 10 percent, or under 3,000 people. Though I paid $25 for my ticket, the price had increased to over $70 on the secondary markets by the time I left for Wyoming. Capitalism, right?

Since I spent several days in Wyoming on this trip, I’m breaking this all up into a few separate posts. This one will only deal with the stuff on Saturday, since it was a pretty full day. The next post or two will cover the stuff after that, including the wonderful world of Covid air travel.

Like on most days and trips, I started my day with breakfast. But y’all, I cannot praise the cinnamon rolls at J’s Prairie Rose Café enough. Hands down the best cinnamon roll I have ever tasted, bar none. I couldn’t believe when I first took a bite out of that thing. I could go on about it, but you get the picture. Everything else was really good, too: the hash browns, the omelet, the sourdough toast. But that cinnamon roll, damn. When I went to pay my check, I asked if I could get a couple more of them to go, and the waitress obliged happily. They were $2.75 each, and if I lived in Laramie, I would have one every day of my life and die of diabetes before the age of 50. When I told her I thought they were the best I’d ever tasted, she smiled and said, “That’s what we aim for.” Mission accomplished, my good lady.

My next stop was one of the local swag stores, for Wyoming Cowboys gear. They are the Cowboys (and Cowgirls, for the ladies teams), but they also go by the term “Pokes,” for cowpokes, which I’m assuming is more gender inclusive. I can dig it. It leaves room for all kinds of innuendo, of which I am a big fan. I had looked online before I left home and found a hooded jacket that looked amazing and would be great for chilly games. Only this store, the Brown and Gold , had it. I walked in and found it, in my size, so I picked it up and looked around for anything else that might catch my eye. I hadn’t really expected it, but I do like this color combination. And since I don’t expect to be back in Wyoming any time soon, best to get anything I might like now. I ended up with a cheap beanie hat (for the ears during the game) and t-shirt from the pandemic (since I had neglected a short-sleeve shirt for sleeping purposes; long-sleeve shirts just make me too hot at night).

With the merch acquired, it was time to check out the sights around the Wyoming campus. But here I was faced with a bit of a dilemma. So I’m from the South, and we just don’t deal with snow and ice on the roads, at least not very well. Laramie, and all of Wyoming it seems these days, is covered in snow. The roads are mainly slush, once enough traffic gets through; but until then, the lanes are hard to detect through the snow, and once the snow melts a little, it turns to ice. (The high temperature for the day was only 26 degrees F.) I had done well enough so far, but I wasn’t willing to risk it when I could easily stroll along Grand Avenue and be at the campus in less than 10 minutes. I was adequately dressed for the weather, and so I left my car across the street from the Brown and Gold and proceeded to spend the rest of my day on foot.

If I’m totally honest, I was anxious that the campus of the University of Wyoming might disappoint me. I visited the school back in 2015 and loved it. I didn’t want my memories to be dashed if it wasn’t as good as I remembered it. I needn’t have worried.

The snow-covered campus was dream-like. It was a postcard come to life. My readers probably think I’m just delusional, maybe because of that good cinnamon roll at breakfast. Perhaps. But there’s just something magical about this place to me. I even walked in from a different direction than I had done in 2015, and the campus still left me speechless. The main quad area is surrounded by classroom buildings on 3 sides, and by the gym and Wyoming Union on the other. I took a quick look inside the Union, where the official campus store is located, and I ended up with some chap stick, a cheap baseball cap with what I can only describe as carpet that spells out ‘Pokes’ across the front, and a wooden Christmas ornament for my tree back home. Aside from that, the entire building was virtually deserted. I couldn’t tell if this was the normal situation on chilly Saturday mornings, but I do know that Wyoming had gone to virtual classes earlier in the semester.

The highlight of any visit to the University of Wyoming simply MUST be the beautiful quad. They have walkways that crisscross the area so you can be inside the splendor, or you can circumnavigate it and let the beauty enthrall you from the outside. But with so few people meandering around the campus, most of the snow on the ground is uniform and pristine. No impressions of footsteps disturb the tranquil landscape. I must have spent at least 30 minutes just walking around this area in awe. Any passersby probably thought I was high from the way my face kept lighting up and then glancing off in the distance at some new spectacle.

Ultimately, hunger drove me away from the campus. I lucked out on an Irish pub not far from campus and on the way back to my car: O’Dwyer’s Public House . It doesn’t look like much from the outside, and the drive-through liquor window on the west side of the building certainly could give one cause for alarm. But the interior of this place was another of those TARDIS moments—I wouldn’t have expected as much open (and cozy) space inside this nondescript green building. Yet here I was, in a restaurant that I can only describe as a rotunda. And thankfully, only 4 other patrons were inside.

The waitress was friendly enough, and I ultimately settled on a poutine burger. When she brought it to me, there was a noticeable absence of any bun, but when I started poking around with my fork, I found that the burger was underneath the mounds of cheese curds, fries, and mushroom gravy. And once again, my taste buds didn’t know what they had done to be treated so well today. But it was too much food for me to finish, perhaps owing to that large breakfast I had eaten already. So I got at least half of it in a to-go box; I didn’t have to worry about the food spoiling in my car in these temperatures.

The game was slated to begin at 4:00, with the stadium opening at 2:00. It was only 1:30 at this point, so I chose to walk the other way down Grand Avenue and see what kinds of chain restaurants were around. That wasn’t actually my intention, but that’s what happened. I suppose it’s a convenient location for campus and students. I walked only 3 blocks before I found a McAllister’s and decided I needed to get in a little warmth and recharge my phone before the game. I could also expect to find some of that Southern delicacy, sweet tea, while I warmed up. I did, and I did. And around 2:00, I collected all my belongings and walked back towards the stadium.

War Memorial Stadium —at least the third stadium I’ve been to with that name—isn’t really all that big. It only holds about 30,000 people in a normal year, but I can’t imagine that it gets filled up frequently, if at all. One of the slogans for the athletic department is “One State / One University / One Team,” so I guess I could be wrong about that. The population of the entire state is only 550,000 people, and the total enrollment for the university is under 13,000 students.

The stadium has no seating in the end zones. One end zone is filled with the athletics facility, out of which the team runs onto the field before the start of the game. The other end zone is home to the giant score board, under which lies the trailer for the mobile Brown and Gold swag store that I had visited earlier. My seat was on the visitors’ side, but there weren’t that many visitor fans at this game. The opponent was Boise State, a team that is usually ranked and doing well. But in the season of pandemic, they had lost one game and fallen out of the rankings, never to have returned. Wyoming had only played 5 games so far, having won only 2 of them. So I wasn’t really here to watch a prominent matchup with national implications.

A little before the game began, snow started to fall. Lightly at first, and through most of the first quarter. It was just a cute little addition to the game, and really a first for me. At the Notre Dame game last year, I had seen some flurries during the game, but nothing stuck. This snow was sticking. And it was then when I noticed that my new hooded jacket, made of cotton, might not have been the best top layer for a snow game.

I also began noticing how much moisture was collecting in my face mask. It’s not normally a problem when temperatures are above freezing; the moisture escapes, and sometimes it fogs up my glasses if I don’t have a nose clip inside my mask (which is why I insist on masks with nose clips). But here, the temperature difference is so great (and it definitely helps keep your nose and mouth warm) that the wetness just piles up on the inside. And when I would take off my mask, my facial hair would be soaked. It was not a pleasant experience.

I did get some hot chocolate before the game, but that’s where I found out that they weren’t selling souvenir cups (first time all season I’ve had to leave empty handed). Major bummer. The chocolate was nice and warm, but out in the stands, it quickly cooled off. It would leave a little ring in the snow next to my chair for the first few times I put it down; but then I finished it and it became another surface to collect the falling snow.

But what about the game? In all honesty, it wasn’t particularly thrilling. Perhaps part of that was because I was trying to keep my fingers and toes from succumbing to frostbite for much of the game. Phone-touch-capable gloves are convenient, but they don’t provide much insulation. And my duck boots are great for keeping water out, but not the cold (even with dri-fit socks inside wool socks). Every other part of my body was totally fine, and once I started walking around after the second quarter, things kept pretty warm in the extremities.

I wasn’t expecting this game to be a slugfest, or a shootout, or really anything. Boise State was the clear favorite, expected to win by 9 or 10 points. But they started with an interception on the first drive, which set up a short field for Wyoming. Even then, the Pokes couldn’t get it into the end zone, so they settled for a field goal. It was their only scoring for the first half. Boise State put together a long drive after that and scored a touchdown. But that was it for the first quarter. The snow had begun falling regularly at this point, so I got the new experience of seeing the stadium officials using handheld snow plows to scoop the snow off the yard lines (every 10 yards) and the hash marks that go longways through the field. They did this during every timeout during the game. The second quarter was more of the same as the snow intensified, and the Wyoming defense did a pretty decent job of stymying what was supposed to be a good Boise offense. They only allowed a field goal, and so the score was 10-3 at the half.

This game was also the final home game of the season for Wyoming, which usually means they recognize the seniors. They hadn’t done it before the game, and they didn’t do it at the half, either. Instead, all we got was a list of seniors for ALL sports teams at Wyoming on the big screen. That was a little sad.

For the second half, I took up a position in the end zone underneath the big score board. Other people were gathering there, and it looked like a good place to enjoy the action if it ever came down to this end of the field. Plus I needed to move around to get the blood circulating. I did see lots of kids playing in the snow, but none of them were running wild like at that Marshall game from last year.

Wyoming began the second quarter with a field goal, which gave everyone some hope that the struggling offense might be able to keep up with Boise as long as the defense would hold. But the Boise offense closed out the quarter with another touchdown, putting an end to most people’s hopes. The quarterback for Wyoming, Levi Williams, had not been having a good game, or really a good few games in a row, and I couldn’t figure out why they kept leaving him in. He was clearly not going to put together the big plays to score touchdowns. (It turns out he was suffering from some kind of hip injury, so all he could do was hand off the ball for the second half.) Finally in the fourth quarter, they put in Gavin Beerup, the backup quarterback, who took the offense down the field and still only managed a field goal out of it. With less than 5 minutes left to play, Wyoming gave it back to Boise and hoped the defense would hold them. They did, and with under a minute left, Wyoming’s offense took over. But it was more of the same, and as time expired, Beerup through an interception to Boise and sent everyone home to find warmth somewhere else. FINAL SCORE: BOISE STATE 17, WYOMING 9.

So it ended up being a closer game than people expected, which I’m always a fan of. I also wonder how much the weather played a role in that. I know the weather wreaked havoc on my electronics. By the end of the third quarter, my camera’s batteries kept saying “exhausted” after I took only 3 or 4 pictures; I would change up the AA batteries and get a few more pics out of them every time, but that trick stopped working before the end of the game. My phone was also problematic. I’m glad I charged it up at McAllister’s before I came to the game. It died before the fourth quarter, too, as I watched it go from 37 percent to 18 percent in about 5 minutes. Then I restarted it, only to watch it go from 17 percent to 8 to 7 to 1 to bye. It was pretty infuriating. When I got back to the car (free parking, only a block away from the stadium!), I plugged the phone into the car charger and found that it was miraculously back to 37 percent. And back at the hotel, the camera batteries were just fine when I turned it back on. I guess I’ve learned some valuable lessons about batteries and temperatures, which run contrary to what I was always taught about putting batteries in the freezer. But I digress.

The drive back to my hotel was on snowy roads, but without incident. I know I was excited to get back into a heated room. My feet and fingers especially enjoyed the time to thaw out. Despite all the potential discomforts and the lackluster performances on the field, I still had a great time. And I would do it all again if I lived in Laramie.

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