337 or 225?

C L O S I N G A T 7 O N S U N D A Y ! the top lines of the sign had been arranged to read. When the grocery store employee stepped back to survey his handy work, the bottom line came out of hiding: G O L S U !

For a moment, I wasn't sure where I was. Had I taken a wrong turn and wound up in Baton Rouge? Or was Lafayette suddenly annexed as a meaty subdivision of our capital city?

Surely, this couldn't be in Lafayette. Why would this be in Lafayette? Isn't Lafayette - hear me out - not a part of Baton Rouge? Do we not have a college of our own? Truly there can't be that many Louisiana State University graduates working as bag boys at my neighborhood grocer to warrant them shutting down early. Then an even funnier thing happened.

That night, after a quarterback who appeared unfit to play Pop Warner lost by a mere seven points, a herd of fans trampled into Academy Sporting Goods, buying up all their LSU National Championship gear ... at 11 o'clock at night ... on a Sunday ... in Lafayette. The purple and gold flu, however, was not quarantined to the Hub City. My own mother, over in Kentwood, suffering from the sniffles, stayed up late that night to root for a school neither of her sons or herself attended. I know of people here and yonder with no ties to the campus in Baton Rouge who threw parties egging the Tigers on to victory.

The next morning on the way to work, cars passed flying the purple and gold as if they were our national colors and we had just won a war ... on the Fourth of July. Stickers. License frames. Antenna toppers. Raising Cane's beamed National Champs Priceless from their sign. Granted, they are a Baton Rouge-based business, but doesn't their lobby bleed vermilion? Not to be left out, other Lafayette business followed suit.

At work it was arguably worse. In the days leading up to the big game, we ran a cover story about the Sugar Bowl. The Daily Advertiser reported on it daily and offered special sections and front-page treatments. A book is forthcoming. Somehow, geography bent like a stick in water to the laws of popularity and pack mentality, and Baton Rouge became part of the eight parishes we serve.

Now, it's one thing to have a touch of pride. For all those LSU alumni, I see where you are coming from - that's your team and no matter where the job takes you, you will support them. However, for the rest of you, and there can't be that many LSU grads in this town, to borrow a line from the Cajun Bar, if you can't support the Cajuns, move to Baton Rouge.

But this whole fever didn't start at kickoff in the Superdome or even the week before. People from all over this state are always hell-bent on supporting LSU. College grads and college-town residents leave their teams in the dust for Death Valley on Saturday after Saturday in the fall. And apparently, the fervor is not for all winning teams as, last year, McNeese came a game away from taking their championship and it received scarce play outside of Lake Charles. In other words, LSU has some kind of strange hold on this state. No matter where you go in Louisiana, no matter the educational degree or where they earned their degree, people love LSU.

If you think about it, the more support LSU gets, the better program they will develop. Even with LSU ticket prices soaring higher that Cipro bottles after an anthrax outbreak, Death Valley still fills to its skyscraping heights. Plus it doesn't hurt a player when he looks into the stands and sees a moving mass of purple chanting the letters of his team. Now, after a national championship and a nationally televised game, requests for admissions applications have spiked at LSU.

I guess it all comes down to this: I know there won't be a rash of babies named Bustle born next year and that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette isn't exactly packing them in with their winning ways. I also know everybody loves a winner, even if they have nothing to do with them and came on board in the fourth quarter. But, if Lafayette supported the vermilion half as much as they praised the purple the first weekend of 2004, you wouldn't have to travel to Death Valley to see a winning team.



nick.pittman@timesofacadiana.com