Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Winners by proxy

The past few weeks I've seen a number of fresh(wo)men (for the first month you can usually tell who's new) wearing Wisconsin Rose Bowl shirts. The last win was in 2000, when the freshmen were 6 years old and probably not following college football closely. Naturally the team that won is long gone. Nevertheless a sense of continuity, or at least the desire for continuity, is strong enough to induce freshmen to part with a few extra bucks to co-celebrate a distant victory.

2 comments:

  1. Could they be legacy attenders whose parents always favored the team? Or do you think this is just an attempt to show they "get it" as early as possible so they don't feel out of place?

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  2. Both good suggestions. Unfortunately I've a little delicacy about buttonholing random women on the sidewalk to ask them about their clothing. I guess I don't have what it takes to be a social researcher, or a pollster.

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