Why do rivalries exist?

The next Friday, Joe Trohman started chatting with me after our Freshman Writing Seminar. After a meaningful discussion about the implications of a new discovery in quantum mechanics on the meaning of life, Joe asked me a rather odd question that I didn't know how to answer.

"Are you going to the football game tonight?" he asked me as we entered the dining hall.

"What football game?" I said. Up until that point, I was only vaguely aware that Kale University had a football team at all. Kale wasn't exactly a school that was known for its sports prowess.

Joe rolled his eyes and said, "We're playing Yale tonight. Everyone's going to be there. Even Andy's going, and he's not interested in anything remotely athletic that's not Crossfit."

"That doesn't make sense," I said. "I didn't think that Yale was in our conference."

"They're not, but we play them every year anyways," Joe said. "It's a tradition."

"I see," I said. "Maybe I'll go."

"You can think about it," Joe said. "I'll see you at the game if you go. I'm going to be in the student section. I even wore the Kale T-shirt that I bought when I got accepted just for the occasion!"

I looked over at Joe's T-shirt, and saw that he was wearing the exact same Kale T-shirt that I owned. "I have that shirt too," I said.

"That's neat," Joe said. "I love the school slogan, by the way. 'I don't just want to be a footnote in someone else's happiness.' It's so inspirational."

"I think so too," I said.

Joe and I both finished up our lunches and headed back to Flack Hall. When I arrived back in my dorm, I thought about the football game.

Football is one thing that I've never quite understood. Why would anyone want to participate in a sport where concussions and head injuries are all but guaranteed? Such violence doesn't make sense, and I've never been one to want to support it. Football simply doesn't have a purpose - it doesn't even entertain me, although I know that some people would disagree. I could argue that it does make others happy, and that is the purpose of football. I could also argue that football is how Kale, along with practically every other university in the country, is making its money, so it has the purpose of paying for my tuition, but that's a little too cynical for my taste.

I also personally don't understand why everyone at Kale hates Yale University so much. We're close to Yale, and we're constantly confused with them, but I had never met a Yale student. I couldn't judge them before I met them.

Despite my worries, I decided to go to the football game. I had my moral objections to football, but supporting my school and spending some time with my friends seemed more important. I dressed myself in red and black, complete with the same Kale University T-shirt as Joe, and walked to Desfilenegro Field, the only Kale building that was farther from the center of campus than Flack Hall. It took me forever to get there, and when I did arrive, it turned out that I had to buy tickets.

"That will be thirty dollars," the woman at the ticket counter said.

I fumbled through my wallet, but I already knew that there was no way that I had enough. I stepped out of the way as I counted up my money, uncertain of how I would get into the game if I couldn't pay for tickets. Why are college football games so expensive? I'm a Kale student - shouldn't it be free for me to support my school? What was the point of a monetary system anyways? Was there a better way to ensure that everyone could get what they needed?

I had six dollars and ninety three cents in my wallet, which wasn't even close to the amount that I needed to pay. I could call my mom and ask her for a little bit more money, but that wouldn't arrive for a while, and it seemed unethical to ask her for more money when she was working so hard just to support herself. I didn't want to go back to being the burden that I had been for her over the past eighteen years.

A few minutes later, Patrick walked up to the ticket counter. "Hi Ryan," he said. "What's up?"

"I'm trying to get into the game, but I don't have enough money," I said.

"Here you go," Patrick said as he handed me thirty dollars. "I'll pay for you."

"You don't need to do that," I said as I tried to give the money back to him.

"No, take it," Patrick said. "You need it more than I do."

I reluctantly took Patrick's money and paid for my ticket, shoving the six dollars and ninety three cents back into my wallet. I then followed Patrick into the stadium and found a seat on the edge of the student section.

"Hi Ryan!" I heard Joe shout from a few rows above me. I looked up and spotted him, Andy, and a few other kids from Flack Hall sitting together.

"Hey everyone," I said.

"Ryan?" I heard another voice say. "Is that you?" I looked down and saw Gerard and Frank cuddling together directly below me. Joe was right. Practically everyone at Kale had come to the game, making me just another member of their herd. I didn't like the idea of following the mainstream so much, but in this case, it wasn't so bad. There was something nice about seeing the entire student body coming together to support a cause, even if that cause was something as inconsequential as a football game.

A boy around my age sitting just outside of the student section caught my eye. He was wearing a Yale polo, and something looked ever so slightly familiar about him, although I was certain that I had never seen the boy before in my life.

"Hey there," I said as I moved to sit next to him. "What's your name?"

The boy scooted a little bit further away from me as he clutched an economics textbook, but he did respond. "I'm Mikey," he said.

"I'm Ryan," I said. "You're from Yale, right?"

Mikey rolled his eyes and said, "Obviously. The polo gives it away. Are all Kale students this dense?"

"I'm sorry, but just because you go to Yale doesn't mean you're any better than me," I said. "All that means is that you're better at answering multiple choice questions on an exam than I am, you're obscenely rich, or both. It does not make you a superior person."

"Look, I realize you probably still have a lingering inferiority complex regarding your test scores from high school, but we're starting this off on the wrong foot," Mikey said. "I don't have anything against Kale students as a whole. My brother goes here, after all."

"Who's your brother?" I asked.

"You probably don't know him," Mikey said as he flipped through his economics textbook. "He's one of those artsy types. Our parents think that he'll never succeed in life, since we could never have someone without an Ivy League education inherit the family business, but he's quite talented in my opinion." Mikey paused to look through the student section and then said, "Wait! I think that's him!" He pointed towards the row below mine and shouted, "Gerard!"

"Mikey!" Gerard exclaimed as he rushed towards us and enveloped his younger brother in a hug. "How's life at Yale?"

"Everything's going great," Mikey said. He looked back into the Kale student section and said, "Is that your boyfriend over there?"

"You remember Frank, right?" Gerard said. "He came over to our house for Thanksgiving last year."

As if on cue, Frank walked over and joined the conversation. "I do remember that," Frank said. "Your house is really more like a mansion. It's ginormous."

"That's not a word," Mikey said.

"Says the guy who thinks that the plural of moose is moosi," Frank said.

For a few seconds, Mikey looked like he was about to whack Frank over the head with his textbook, but clearly he decided against it. Instead, he sat back down and mumbled something about Yale crushing us during the football game.

"I'll talk to you later, Mikey," Gerard said. "You should come and visit me more often."

"I'll take the bus over to Old Haven next weekend," Mikey said. "You should visit Yale though. It's such a beautiful campus, and the atmosphere is so much better than it is at Kale."

"I guess I'll just have to see it for myself," Gerard said as he sat back down in the student section. He gave Mikey one last wave before the announcer welcome us to Desfilenegro Field for a cross-conference game between Yale University and Kale University. The Kale University Marching Band then took the field, and I was impressed with just how much better they were than my high school marching band. After playing the Kale fight song, which I only sort of knew the words to, the band erupted into the Star-Spangled Banner. In the middle of the song, a lone trombonist started playing "American Idiot" by Green Day, and although the rest of the band didn't seem too pleased with the trombonist, the student section seemed to enjoy it. Gerard even started singing along to the Green Day song instead of the real national anthem.

The whole incident made me wonder about the real meaning of patriotism. Was a national anthem necessary for true patriotism? Weren't there plenty of people who didn't care too much about their country and stood up to sing the national anthem anyways? Does patriotism have any value anyways? The Nazis cared about Germany, yet they were genocidal maniacs. What if patriotism just turned people into Nazis?

In any case, I found the incident with the trombonist to be amusing but unimportant, and everyone forgot about the whole thing once the football game started.

The game itself wasn't all that exciting. Nobody scored at all in the first quarter, and the game seemed to drag on forever. Supposedly, the first quarter was only fifteen minutes, but it felt much longer than that. Between the first and second quarters, Joe left to buy some popcorn to share amongst our corner of the student section, and once I had popcorn, the game sped up a little. By halftime, Yale had fourteen points, but Kale didn't have any.

I found myself falling apart to halftime as the marching band returned to the field, giving us students a little bit of distraction from Kale's lack of football skills. However, the game continued, and Yale thoroughly crushed us during the second half of the game. No matter how much the student section screamed and cheered for our beloved college football team, Kale was losing badly.

In the end, Kale University lost, twenty one to seven. As soon as the game was over, my friends and I headed out of the stands and returned to Flack Hall, a little bit disappointed in Kale's performance during the game.

On my way out, I ran into Mikey again. "I told you that Yale would win," he said as he adjusted his absurdly preppy Yale polo.

"You were right," I admitted. I shuffled out of Desfilenegro Field, hoping to avoid any further interaction with Mikey Way, and thankfully, he headed towards the bus stop while I walked back to Flack Hall.

After that game, I understood why Kale and Yale had such an intense rivalry. They were two schools with similar names, similar locations, and vastly different ideologies. Yale was for the elite: the ones who could pay for a private school education and tutors who could help them get astronomically high standardized test scores. This only resulted in Yale students being the snobbiest people that you could ever hope to meet.

I wasn't sure what Kale stood for, other than not just being a footnote in someone else's happiness, but it sure wasn't that.

I entered Flack Hall and climbed upstairs into my dorm room, and as I did, I thought about the Kale student body. Most of us weren't rich or extremely smart, although a few of us certainly were, but that didn't make Yale better than Kale. That was why we were in this insane rivalry.

From that moment on, I despised Yale University with all of my heart. Perhaps having so much hate in my heart wasn't right, but at the time, it seemed like the correct choice to make.