On spectatorship

For any New York Met fan, this past Sunday was an excruciating and miserable day. A season that had begun with high hopes and effortless wins ended in complete disgrace as the Mets completed a record-breaking late-season collapse by losing to the last place Marlins. The playoff push that was supposed to redeem last year's heartbreaking loss in game seven of the National League Championship Series never had a chance to begin.

Given the Mets' performance in the season's last month, we Met fans had little reason to believe that our team would be able to come back from the overwhelming seven-run deficit that they faced early in the game on Sunday, needing to win to have any chance of a playoff berth. Nonetheless, throughout the game and even past the final out, loyalty and hope seemed to triumph over disappointment. Not only did the majority of the more than 500,000 spectators stay until the bitter end, some even stayed after the game hoping that the players would come back onto the field to thank them for their support. The number of people watching the game on TV actually increased as the game wore on and the possibility of a comeback diminished.

The disgrace of my team blowing its playoff chances characterizes this past weekend for me, but on Saturday, I at least had a brief reprieve from the Mets' saga when a friend and I went to the Princeton football game against Columbia. Unlike Sunday's baseball game, which was never close and would not have been worth watching were I not a Met fan, the football game was exciting until the end, when Princeton pulled away for the 42-32 win. But students at the game were largely disinterested — there was more excitement coming through my TV during the Mets' loss on Sunday than there was among students at the Princeton win on Saturday.

I wasn't surprised when we arrived to see a largely empty student section, having come to terms last year with the fact that the environment at our home football games entirely lacks the electricity that defined the University of Maryland football games I went to while growing up. What was more surprising on Saturday was that much of the student section, unlike the general admission sections, remained seated after big Princeton plays. Is Princeton really that tiring that alumni have more energy to get up and cheer than we do? Excitement on the field apparently doesn't translate to school spirit among students in the stands.

Part of the problem is that few students ever make it to the games, but not necessarily because they are busy studying or out of town. Some of my friends remarked that even though they really enjoyed the tailgate parties, they never even made it into the game at all, choosing to return to their rooms instead of staying to watch the game. For these students, then, and even for all those who went but hardly paid attention to the close game on the field, the social aspect of being a spectator at a football game has evidently superceded the act of spectating itself.

Many first-time visitors to campus, if only because of the prevalence of all things orange, probably assume that Princeton pride is more widespread than it is. Indeed, orange is everywhere, and I've yet to meet a student who doesn't possess a disproportionate amount of orange apparel. Visitors might not realize, however, that none of us ever actually choose to purchase any of it — if you see someone in an orange T-shirt, look closely and you'll see that it was a free T-shirt received at some special event and is likely only being worn because the wearer is at the end of his or her wash cycle.

Among current students, with the exception of athletes, true veins of orange rarely shine through. But one need only attend reunions or even a home football game to notice that Tiger pride is contagious among alums. Does walking out of FitzRandolph Gate instantly engender graduates with a love of Old Nassau? Maybe love of Princeton can only really be formed outside the University once thoughts of problem sets and writing seminars are long forgotten.

Twenty years from now, after Annual Giving and visits to Reunions have converted us all into the dedicated Princeton supporters that we weren't while here, we'll possibly have something of the emotional attachment to Princeton that now-suffering Mets fans have to their team. Currently it seems like we have only a shadow of that attachment — the orange clothing is there, but the sentiments one might expect to find underneath it aren't. Michael Medeiros is a sophomore from Bethesda, Md. He can be reached at mmedeiro@princeton.edu.