Xatal

When I was coming back from Santa Cruz, my family pulled a fast one on me and told me that they’d bought four tickets to this year’s Emerald Bowl in San Francisco.

I’m not a big fan of college football, since UCSC doesn’t have its own team, but since Cal (UC Berkeley) was in it, I took some interest. My brother goes to Berkeley, which is the main reason why my family decided to go.

The game was against the Miami Hurricanes. At first I was a bit unsure of whether or not to root for Cal, considering that I don’t go there and they turned down my application, but in the end I decided to support them a little bit.

The UC Berkeley marching band spelling out Cal on the field

The game was at the AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. I was surprised that it wasn’t at Candlestick (home of the 49ers), since that’s an actual football stadium, but it worked out well. The ballpark is beautiful with a wonderful view of the bay. Of course, we were only one row away from being at the very top of the stadium, but that provided us with a great view.

It was a pretty close game. Cal had two big plays early on that put them up 14-0, and then Miami slowly chiseled away at that lead until the game was tied at 17. Cal couldn’t really get too much going offensively — they kept making blunders that would blow any momentum they had — and they were having a harder and harder time at stopping the Miami offense. However, Miami made a  mistake and fumbled the bowl deep in their own territory, and Cal recovered and scored a touchdown that put them ahead to win the game.

Seeing as the game was in San Francisco (right by Berkeley), I was pretty glad Cal won, considering that, had they lost, the backlash from the 40,000 Cal fans that were there would be pretty bad to be around.

All in all it was actually pretty fun, I had never been to a major football game before, let alone a bowl game. It makes me wish UCSC had a football team. :)