I’ll never forget that night, way back in 1998. My friend Trish, still a friend to this day, called me — I picked up the landline in my parent’s bedroom in Roseville, CA to talk with her — to ask if I was watching. I was, of course; as a Northern Californian in her sophomore year at TCU, I had a lot of reasons to be locked into a game featuring the upstart Horned Frogs against a burgeoning powerhouse Trojans program, helmed by one Carson Palmer.
Trish’s phone call was one of the critical moments of my college football fandom, one of those moments that I look back on all these years later as a seminal marker pinpointing the day I fell in love with the Frogs.