The first wave of students swarming the Maples Pavilion floor after redshirt junior Nick Robinson’s game-winning buzzer beater against Arizona on February 7 had earned the right to be there. They had been waiting for four days.
The tents began going up outside Maples on Tuesday morning, some 100 hours before game time. It takes more than dedication to hold out that long. Based on the contents of the first two campsites, it requires ingenuity and a lot of fluids. An inventory:
Four-person tent (rain fly preferred), blankets, sleeping bags, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pillow, bullhorn, lawn chairs, reading lamp, homework from Mathematical and Computational Methods for Engineers, apple-cinnamon Cheerios, 2-liter bottle of Pepsi, sour cream and onion Pringles, portable grill, two bicycles, problem sets from Computer Science 103B: Discrete Structures, ice chest, six Red Stripe beers, two Coronas, two Downtown Brown microbrews, five Honest Teas (“organic”), three orange Gatorades, two cans of Coke, two bottles of Canada Dry, case of bottled water, Wheat Thins.
Other equipment: X-Box game unit, extension cords, projector and white sheets. (Useful for playing “Halo” and “Dead or Alive” in the evenings, displayed on a nearby sheet-draped fence.)
And a good-luck charm can’t hurt. Junior Jason Payne brought his—a knee brace worn as a sympathy gesture for injured player Justin Davis, ’03. It probably came in handy in that postgame dogpile.
