Nobody knew what to do when Noah Kim came out of the tunnel. So mostly they did nothing.

Noah Kim came out of the visitors’ tunnel at Spartan Stadium at 11:34 on Saturday morning, in the wrong shade of green, and a few hundred people clapped.

That is a guess and it is the honest one. It was not nothing and it was not much. Most of the stadium was in a line for something, and the ones who were in their seats mostly did what people do when they are not sure of the etiquette, which is nothing at all.

Kim was Michigan State’s quarterback in 2023. He is 24 now, in his seventh year of college football, playing for Eastern Michigan on an NCAA waiver, and he is a captain there. He completed 13 of 26 passes Saturday for 205 yards, threw a touchdown and two interceptions, and Michigan State won 41-13.

Last week I wrote about a man named Terrance Vaught, who is 46, supervises a warehouse in Holt and has had four seats in the south end since 2009. He told me he was terrible to Kim in 2023. He was more specific about it than he had to be. He said he stood up in the fourth quarter of a game Michigan State was losing by 30 and called a 20-year-old things, out loud, with his 11-year-old son next to him. He said he did not know what he was going to do Saturday.

What he did was stand up. He said he did not decide to.

“I had a whole month and I didn’t plan it,” Vaught said Sunday. “Isaiah stood up. My kid. He’s fourteen now and he doesn’t stand up for anything, he doesn’t take his hood off in the house. He stood up and he started clapping and I looked at him and I thought, well, okay.”

He clapped for about six seconds, then sat down and felt embarrassed, and then got annoyed with himself for feeling embarrassed.

“Nobody was looking at me,” he said. “That’s the part. I had this whole thing in my head about how it was going to be a big deal and nobody cared. Which is fine. It wasn’t for them.”

The one person who was still here

Here is the part of Saturday nobody wrote about, because the woman at the middle of it does not talk to reporters and had no reason to start.

Denise Hollifield has worked in the equipment room at the Duffy Daugherty building since 2007. She is 58, she lives in Holt too, which she thought was funny when I told her about Vaught, and she has outlasted three head coaches, two athletic directors, one interim athletic director and the worst year this athletic department has ever had.

It has been reported over and over, correctly, that nobody who currently coaches Michigan State football was here when Noah Kim played. Nobody has bothered to say that some people were.

“He was a nice kid,” she said. “He was polite to me, which not all of them are, and I don’t hold that against the ones who aren’t, they’re nineteen. He came in early. He was always in early, before anybody.”

She said that by the end of 2023 she had started saying things to him in the hallway that she does not normally say to players.

“Not big things. Morning. How you doing today. That’s all. Because you could see it on him, and there wasn’t anybody else. Everybody was busy being in the middle of what everybody was in the middle of.”

She did not go to the game Saturday. She works Saturdays. But Eastern Michigan did its walkthrough at the stadium on Friday afternoon, and she was there.

“I said his name and he turned around and he came over,” she said. “He gave me a hug. He remembered my name.” She stopped for a while. “That was the whole thing. That was it, that was the whole story. I’ve been thinking about it since Friday and I don’t know why.”

And then everybody screamed

With four minutes left and Michigan State ahead 34-13, Kim threw a short pass to the sideline and a Michigan State defensive back named Tre Bell was standing where the ball was going. Bell caught it and ran 71 yards for a touchdown and Spartan Stadium made the loudest noise it has made in years.

I want to sit with that for one paragraph, because I was in it and I did exactly what everybody else did.

Seventy thousand people who had spent an hour that morning deciding to be decent to a 24-year-old lost their minds at the worst throw of his afternoon. Both of those things were real, they happened about ninety minutes apart, and nobody in that building experienced them as a contradiction. I did not. I was standing up.

Kim spoke afterward for eleven minutes and was gracious in a way that suggests he has done a lot of these.

“It was good to be back, and I heard the clapping, so thank you for that,” he said. “I threw a bad ball at the end. He was sitting right there on it. That’s on me, that’s not complicated.”

Somebody asked whether he thought about 2023 during the week. He said yes, and then he said the honest version of it.

“I thought about it Tuesday,” he said. “And then it was Wednesday and I had to go to work. That’s the truth. That’s not me being tough about it, it’s just what happens.”

Mansour, who had never met him and said so twice last week, went and found him at midfield afterward and they stood there talking for a while.

“I told him I hope he gets a good year out of it,” Mansour said. “That was it, it wasn’t a moment. I don’t know him.” Then, because somebody asked: “I thought our crowd was decent to him. I noticed it. I don’t think that was nothing.”

The first half was not fun

The game itself was two different afternoons. Michigan State led 20-10 at halftime and that stadium sat there like it was down three scores, because Eastern Michigan’s running back kept getting up and going forward and everybody could see it.

Nobody booed. It was quieter than booing. I have been coming to this stadium for eleven years and I know that sound, and it is the sound of a lot of people separately deciding that they knew this was coming.

The man behind me spent most of the second quarter yelling one player’s name, over and over, and it was the same name people were yelling last week. I am not going to print what he said and I am not going to print the name here, because that is somebody else’s job this week and they are doing it. What I will say is that his wife told him to sit down twice and he did not.

Then Michigan State came out after halftime and ran the ball down the field twice in a row and the whole building turned back on like a light. By the fourth quarter people were laughing. A section near me gave a standing ovation to a one-yard touchdown by a redshirt freshman most of them had never heard of.

South Bend

Michigan State is 2-0 and goes to Notre Dame on Saturday, and the people I know who go to games have already started doing arithmetic about it.

Vaught has been to Notre Dame Stadium twice, in 2005 and 2013, and he describes both trips the way people describe a hospital stay. His brother-in-law has been calling since Sunday morning.

“He’s got a room in Mishawaka and he wants gas money, and I said no,” Vaught said. “I said I’m watching it at my house where I can turn it off. Then he sent me a picture of the room this morning. So, I don’t know. Ask me Wednesday.”

He said Isaiah wants to go, which he brought up twice without being asked about it, which is how you know.

Nobody I talked to has any idea what to expect out there. Notre Dame lost by 28 at home to Wisconsin two weeks ago and then beat Rice by 42 on Saturday, and every person I asked had a confident opinion about which of those was the real one, and no two of them matched.

Denise Hollifield is working Saturday. She works most Saturdays. She said she will hear how it went the way she always hears how it went, which is from whoever comes back through the door first.