Poser pigs and tow trucks

A lesson I learned early from my dad was that major sporting events offer the best time to run errands.

When I was nine, our hometown Redskins made it into the Superbowl, and we were unable to escape the madness. I remember being at a party, donning a pig's nose, seeing my dad do the same, and realizing that there was just no faking it. We were poser pigs, and we looked really silly.

When the time came for me to head off to college, I picked University of Wisconsin-Madison, a big 10 school with a serious football team led by Bucky the Badger.

My career as a Badger was, almost impossibly, even less luminary than my previous stint as a Redskin's fan. I did try — I purchased a season's pass for the 'bleacher creatures' student section of the stadium and even got a vintage Badger shirt. This time around, I actually attempted to get educated, to learn what a 'down' was, and my roommates did their best. But I was pretty useless. They tolerated me, until the day I accidentally cursed a critical moment of a game by saying, 'they'll never make that!' I don't think Jami Brown spoke to me for a week. She grew up going to Giants games - I think her dad might even have been an announcer. I'd committed serious blasphemy.

That was the end of my football career.

But I can't quite seem to shake that pigskin ball — now I live almost directly in the shadow of the MSU Bobcat's stadium. For a state with no professional sports teams, (even to me that's weird,) college football in Montana is a big thing. As in 'close off the main road', 'light off the fireworks', 'parachute in some Bobcat-outfitted people' big. On home game days, we can barely park our car, or hear ourselves think. There's this oddly animated 'Rrrrroar!' they play whenever the Bobcats score. At first the kids were mystified, now Zoey purrs with excitement when she hears that rrrroar. "They won!," she chortles.

Maybe in the Chester-Vance family merger, some football spirit might live.

I've definitely learned a lot about the game from the five seasons of 'Friday Night Lights' that I've just gulped down. That totally underrated series about high school football in a small town in Texas lit a real fire under me, a fire that was fed when I realized that my own adopted small town shares a penchant for hometown fame and glory.

A few weeks ago we were eating at Burger Bob's when I looked up and saw heroic football photos of Stan and Dusty Daws on the wall.

 As in Stan and Dusty, my local father-son Statefarm agent team.

One half of the dynamic duo.

Last weekend, I took the girls out to this Halloween party eleven miles up the canyon, and two miles past that on a dirt road. No cell service, no plowing service either. (It takes the family who lives there two hours to plow that dirt road.)

Anyway, as I bundled up all the Fall Montana necessities - coats, hats, mittens - and Halloween gear, I got flustered and locked my keys in the car. Normally I don't even lock my doors, so I have no idea what I was doing. I decided not to worry too much about it; there were probably 150 people there from Stella's school so I figured we could get a ride back if we had to.

After enjoying a few rice crispie spiders, some watermelons brains, and too many jokes about riding in our covered wagon back home, (yes, those are Ma, Laura, and Baby Grace Ingalls costumes we're in, (think Little House on on the Prairie,)) I called Best Rate Towing.

"Who's your insurance with?" the guy asked.



"Brad and Dusty Daws."

"Oh, no problem. Tell me what your car looks like, I'll send Jason on out and he'll track it down, [out of the 60 lined up on the road,] open it, and leave your keys on your seat. We'll get your information from Brad."

"You mean I don't have to wait by my car for 40 minutes in the pitch dark?"

"No ma'am."

Oh yes.

As the 'Cheers' theme song ingrained in all of us 80s TV watchers, "Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your [insurance agent's] name..."



Monday morning bonus: the full lyrics to "Cheers": http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/cheerslyrics.html