More than A Win

PASADENA, Calif. – They came from South Bend and South Florida, from Chicago, Churubusco and places no GPS can pronounce. They arrived by plane, by Prius, by pure faith. And when they entered the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, they walked like people who’d just been handed a key to Santa’s workshop.

This was Disneyland, but not make-believe.

It was Indiana 38, Alabama 3.

The dream? That wasn’t the final score. That was all of it.

You could see it on their faces, that odd mix of disbelief and perfect certainty. Like a kid who sneaks downstairs and does see Santa. They weren’t surprised that it happened. Just that it happened to them.

I should’ve talked to more of them. They were everywhere. In red sweaters and candy-stripe pants. In “Mendoza 8” shirts, and vintage “Mallory” pullovers, and candy-cane scarves pulled from closets that had never before been to Pasadena.

I got caught in foot traffic after the game and wound up next to a man in a Mendoza shirt, one of several thousand.

“Come on!” his son yelled from ahead. “You have a player pass for a reason.”

The dad turned to me, smiling.

“Not sure anybody cares about passes right now.”

He was right. The fans were floating. Back to the parking lot. Back to real life, though it looked a little less real than it had an hour ago.

The dad’s name, by the way, was Fernando.

His son had just lit up Alabama for 250 passing yards, a 250 passer rating, and the most lopsided College Football Playoff win this season. This wasn’t just Indiana’s first bowl win since 1991 — it was a football exorcism. A win that finally said aloud what Hoosier fans had whispered all year:

We’re not just in the playoff.

We’re not just a nice story.

We’re legit. We’re the best team in the country. And we just treated Alabama like mid-November Rutgers.

They’ll debate that in Eugene and Oxford and Miami. But they won’t debate it in Indiana.

Not anymore.

A young couple got on the elevator after the game, still red-cheeked from cheering. “We went to IU,” they said. “We live in Chicago now.”

The woman clutched her fiancé’s arm, glowing.

“It’s so amazing,” she said.

Everybody wore that same little smile. The one that says, this was worth it.

This was a triumph for Curt Cignetti, sure. For Fernando Mendoza, absolutely. For Pat Coogan, the first offensive lineman MVP in Rose Bowl history? You bet.

But mostly, this was for the people from Memorial Stadium, who remember when Antwaan Randle El ran for his life on every snap. For the folks in row 39, who watched Hoosier football because their fathers did — and their fathers before them — not because they expected this.

For 124 years, they dreamed.

Now they believe.

And once belief takes root, it spreads like wildflowers.

Across the field, the Alabama fans filed out in silence. The scoreboard didn’t just say 38-3. It said the world was upside-down. It said why not Indiana?

It said the pixie dust worked.