Whoop! He called it!

When Soldier Son stepped off the plane from Germany a couple of weeks ago, he had one thought on his mind: Aggie football. Number One Son was eager to pick him up from the airport, but SS's instructions were explicit: my job was to pick him up at the airport, and NOS's job was to get a table at a local bar that would have the game on tv.

Almost from the time he got off the plane, SS was all about the Aggies. "They're better than people think," he assured me. "Nobody is giving them credit for how good they are. The coach knows what he's doing." I was so glad to have him home after almost a year away that I didn't care what he had to say, and seeing his determination that he was supporting the right team had me almost as excited as he was.

The first play of the game made him look right. The bad guys snapped the ball badly, and our guys had 2 points. SS lit up like a Christmas tree.  By the half, we were up 19 zip, and SS was sailing. In the third quarter, though, the bad guys roared back 17 points, and I was in a knot over what looked to me like a looming loss. NOS had crashed in his car (he had been up late for several nights getting the house ready for his brother to come home, and a few beers had put him down). I left SS with a friend and took NOS home.

A few minutes later, Darling Daughter's Prince Charming tweeted me: "How's SS liking the game?" I had run out, so I had no clue. "33-19" came the answer. In a few seconds, "Yep, 33-19. That's the final." I had to work on that a few minutes to realize that we weren't the team with the 19. SS had been right; whatever anybody thought, we had clearly won that one.

A friend from Germany whose family lives up the road a few miles had an extra ticket for the next week's game, and SS took him up on the offer to use it. He came home beaming about the 42-30 score against a team that was supposed to be much better than ours.

I was a little worried about this week: tonight is SS's last night at home before he ships back to Germany and then on to Afghanistan for a year-long tour, and I'm more than a little sad to see him go. But he had purchased tickets weeks ago so he and his siblings and cousins could go to see our team play a team that is ranked much higher than ours, and I just wasn't convinced that the evening was likely to go very well for him.

As things turned out, I could have gone to the game except that I was working on a project for my consulting business and, well, I didn't think I could cope well with a game that was likely to be as disappointing as I thought this one could be.

As it turned out, I dropped the troops off for a tailgate party and headed home to work on my job. After a couple of hours I surfed the web enough to discover that we had held the bad guys to 3 points in the first quarter, which was much better than the blowout I was afraid of.

A little later, I saw that we had tied it up at 3, which was not exactly a big win for the good guys, but it was okay. Two weeks ago, the bad guys scored on us in the third quarter; last week we pulled ahead in the third. This week we pulled ahead, but in keeping with the early part of the game, only by 3. Good, but not good enough.

I checked back several times in the fourth, but after I saw a tied score at a little more than 6 minutes left, the website I was checking seemed to freeze up, and the time and the score stayed stuck. When I finally got a new time on the game clock, I also saw a new score—and we were ahead!

SS organized the troops to come back home instead of hanging out at bars after the game (fighting the traffic to get home would be less trouble than standing in line), and the troops have decided to stay up all night so we can drop him at the airport early in the morning together.

I don't know how this trip has been for him; he's had some chances to get spoiled and some frustrations that he hasn't been able to do everything he had hoped to do. But I do know that he couldn't be happier about his favorite team and his favorite sport.

He called it!