PISCATAWAY — The idea was for the lyrics to fill this frosty night, for the students and the alums and the football players to stay late, to savor the moment, relish the night, sing-shout the words to the Alma Mater over and over and over. Yes. That was the plan.
For with her motto high,
Rutgers’ name shall never die,
On the banks of the old Raritan …
The band did its part, blaring verse after verse, but by the time it was done, less than 15 minutes after the final gun, that’s all that was left inside High Point Solutions Stadium: Trombone players. Trumpet players. A gaggle of tubas. And when they played the final note …
Nothing. Silence. Not even a remnant of the 52,798 people who had shoe-horned their way inside the stadium, all of them scattered to the parking lot, scattered to the Turnpike, scattered to another long winter of regret and yearning. If the band members looked to their right, up on the large scoreboard behind the south end zone, they saw why they were so lonely:
Louisville 20, Rutgers 17.
“We have a football team that’s hurting,” Rutgers coach Kyle Flood said in the interview room, even as the band kept playing, the drummers kept drumming, out by the large red “R” at midfield. “Their hearts have been ripped out.”
Flood was too close to the heartache of his locker room to acknowledge as much, but it was really much worse than that. Those hearts? The Scarlet Knights had ripped them from their own chests, sabotaged their own destiny, lit this splendid season on fire all by themselves.
Nine wins in 10 games, and all the Knights needed was one win in the final two, either at middling Pittsburgh or last night, against a Louisville team whose brilliant quarterback, Teddy Bridgewater, was playing with one healthy wing and one healthy wheel. All they needed was to protect a 14-3 lead that had sent the yard into a frenzy. And even after so much of that had been squandered, there was still one final drive that could have rescued everything.
Instead, what they have is this: long, bitter months when the players will see a blurry reel of failure in their mind’s eyes, terrible penalties and dropped balls and missed tackles. The defense, so stout all year, allowed three points in the game’s first 44 minutes, then 14 in 16 seconds. The rookie coach mismanaged the clock at game’s end, and could never make the necessary adjustments to halt Louisville’s onslaught.
“We were never able to swing the momentum back,” Flood said. “That’s unfortunate. And that’s on me.”
It was a stand-up move in the aftermath of a falling-down second half, a trail of banana peels that transformed what had been a huge outdoor keg party into a wake.
One play could have changed everything: the penalty that nullified a fake-field-goal touchdown pass; a ball right in receiver Tim Wright’s hands that instead became a fatal interception (and instantly recalled the memory of James Townsend’s end-zone drop in Morgantown, W.Va., six years ago); the fumbled kickoff that permanently shifted the night toward Louisville. A half-dozen others.
“We weren’t able to match them in the end,” Flood said.
They weren’t able to close, after setting themselves up for so much potential glory, after the 9-1 start, after the 14-3 lead. The wait was 143 years and 23 days at kickoff, since the first-ever Rutgers game that was also the first-ever college football game, played during the presidential administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Not one major bowl berth in all that time, and now they were so close to Miami or New Orleans they could taste the stone crabs and the crawfish.
The no-show in Pittsburgh hurt them.
The choke job last night killed them.
So the wait goes on. The fans hurried out, hurried home, knowing sleep wouldn’t come easily for them last night. The players quietly added a fresh layer of burden to this wounded program, headed now to the Big Ten and who knows how many years of plodding before they can reach a similar doorstep.
The band? They gathered one last time, then began playing again, echoing in the empty stadium, banging their drums, blaring their horns until finally they could play no more. Soon enough, the scoreboard clicked off, wiping away the score.
If only it were that easy to cleanse the memory.