Going Back

Steph Ochoa booked the hotel at 1:04 on Tuesday morning, because 1:04 on Tuesday morning is when she gets her break. She works nights on a medical floor in Kalamazoo. She had the room in Mishawaka sitting in her cart since Sunday and had not pulled the trigger on it, because she wanted to ask her dad first, and by the time she asked her dad it had gone from $310 to $382.

“So that’s what asking him cost me,” she said. “Seventy-two dollars. And he told me not to tell him what I paid, so I didn’t tell him what I paid. He’ll find out eventually. He always finds out.”

Four hundred and twelve dollars after tax, two nights, and the two nights were not optional. She is 33 and this is her fourth trip to South Bend. Her father, Ray, is 61 and this is his ninth, and between them they have watched Michigan State lose at Notre Dame Stadium every single time either of them has been in the building.

The people paying it are doing so on the following evidence. Michigan State’s last win at Notre Dame Stadium was September 17, 2016, a 36-28 afternoon in rain that started before the game and did not stop during it. That Michigan State team finished the season 3-9 and got its coach fired eventually. It is the good memory. It is the one everybody over fifty brings up unprompted, and it happened inside the worst year most of them can remember, which is a thing several people said out loud this week without appearing to notice they were saying it.

Since then the Spartans have gone back three times and lost three times, by seventeen, by twenty-four, and by thirty-one. The margins have gotten worse each trip. Nobody had to look that up for me.

Seven buses for the Spartan Marching Band, call time 6:45, which means kids standing in a parking lot in the dark holding instrument cases and coffee. They will be in South Bend before eleven and they will be on their feet most of the day after that.

Kayla Brzezinski is a sophomore mellophone player from Livonia. Her brother marched from 2017 to 2020, which means he was in the band at the same time as the head football coach.

Across town at the Meridian Mall park-and-ride, the alumni club bus leaves at 8:15. A hundred and ten dollars round trip, a boxed lunch, a bathroom on board that eleven people this week described to me as “fine,” and a driver named Rick who has been doing this route since 2014.

Forty-two seats, sold out Monday, with nine people on a waiting list. One of the nine is Marisol Vega, who is 19, from Berwyn outside Chicago, a sophomore studying supply chain, and who has never been to a Michigan State road game.

The Nowaks leave Bay City at 5:40 a.m. and pick up 69 at Flint, which adds an hour and change to the front of everybody else’s trip. Three of them in a Pilot: Ed, who is 81 and rides in front because of his hip, his son Mike, who is 53 and drives the whole way and will not be argued with about it, and Mike’s daughter Nora, who is 16 and has the middle of the back seat to herself.

Ed has made this trip more times than he can put a number on. He tried, on the phone, and got to eleven and then said he thought it was more than that and left it there.

Mike does the packing. He has a spreadsheet, which he was embarrassed about and then described in detail anyway: the cooler, the second cooler with only pop in it because Nora and her friends drink everything, two folding chairs and the good chair for Ed, a wool blanket even though it’s September, and Ed’s pills in a Ziploc in the console rather than the glovebox because the glovebox is where they lost them in 2018.

Nora has been three times. She is 0-3.

Everything from Lansing and everything from Detroit becomes the same traffic at Marshall, in a cloverleaf, next to a Love’s and a Cracker Barrel where the parking lot on a game Saturday is thirty percent green.

Rochelle Pryor will be in it. She is 41, a dental hygienist in Southfield, and she and her brother Andre leave Detroit at seven for a three-thirty kick because Andre does not believe in cutting things close and Rochelle has stopped fighting him on it.

Andre has a thermos, a Bluetooth speaker and a rule about what gets played before the state line, which Rochelle described as “gospel until Battle Creek and then he lets me have it.” She has been to South Bend twice. She has not seen Michigan State score more than fourteen points there.

The three-thirty kickoff is its own small conversation among people who have done this a lot. Noon games mean you leave at five in the morning and you are home by eight at night and you have your Sunday. Night games mean you are on the Toll Road at midnight with your headlights doing all the work and your passengers asleep. A three-thirty is the middle option and roughly nobody defended it to me. You get up early anyway because of parking. You then have to survive from eleven until three-thirty in a field. And you still drive home in the dark.

People stop at Marshall and people stop at Kalamazoo and the twenty miles in between get driven through by everybody at about eight over. It is the part of the trip where the car goes quiet, which several people brought up without being asked.

Here the west side of the state joins. 131 comes down out of Grand Rapids, through Wayland and Plainwell, and hits Kalamazoo with a load of Spartans already two hours into their morning, and from Kalamazoo everybody who is doing it the direct way turns south together.

Denny Vandermolen has been getting on at Grand Rapids since 1974. He is 74 himself, retired out of Consumers Energy after thirty-six years of line work, and he keeps his tickets in the same envelope his wife used to keep them in.

He has been to Notre Dame Stadium fourteen times. He has seen Michigan State win there once, and he cannot tell you the year without looking it up, and he did not look it up.

He is going Saturday. Asked whether he had considered not going, he was quiet for a second.

South of Schoolcraft the freeway ends and 131 becomes a road. One lane each way, no shoulder to speak of, and in the middle of September there is farm equipment on it. The map tells you two hours fifty-five. The map has not met the grain truck outside Constantine.

Gary Tesch lives eleven miles from here, in Sturgis, which makes him one of very few Michigan State fans who can be at Notre Dame Stadium in under an hour and a half. He is 61 and he sells parts for a farm equipment dealer, and in 2018 he came home from South Bend and told his wife Deb that he was finished going.

Asked what changed, he did not bring up the new coach at all. Asked about him directly, he said the man seems all right and he doesn’t know enough about him to have an opinion yet. What he came back to twice was his brother-in-law in Elkhart, a Notre Dame fan who does not let anything go, who has been texting him since Sunday.

There is a sign. It is blue, it says Welcome to Indiana, and there is a smaller one under it about the seat belt law. That is the entirety of the event. The corn is the same on both sides.

Four separate people described what they do here and three of the four descriptions were the same. You turn the music down or you turn it up. Somebody in the car says something. Then you drive another twenty minutes and it goes back to normal.

Fifteen miles of toll road, westbound, and the cash lane at Bristol on a Saturday morning is full of men complaining about a two dollar and forty cent toll while looking very pleased about having the exact change ready in the cupholder.

Pete Ruszkowski runs a landscaping company in Grand Ledge and has been bringing the same setup down here since 2011: a canopy that no longer fits in the truck the way it used to, a flat-top griddle, a card table with a burn on one corner from a year he does not want to talk about, and two hundred and forty brats which is more than anyone needs and which he buys anyway.

Steph and her dad check in Friday afternoon. It is a hotel by a highway next to a Panera, and on the Friday of a Notre Dame home weekend the lobby fills up with people in green standing around the coffee urn at four in the afternoon, all of them pretending not to look at each other.

The last five miles take as long as the previous forty. Everyone gets off at 77, everyone turns south, and everyone sits. There are Notre Dame flags on the light poles and a man selling water out of a wagon and a church with a sign that has a football joke on it.

This is also the first place all day where the two fanbases are physically stuck next to each other, at a red light, for a while.

Kathleen Dwyer is 66, class of 1982, lives in Granger about twenty minutes out, and has been feeding strangers in the same lot for a very long time.

Then there is Doug Pfeil, who is 58, sells commercial insurance in Naperville, did not attend the University of Notre Dame, and is considerably worse about it than the people who did.

He said he was kidding. He did not appear to be kidding.

The lots on campus cost sixty dollars and fill up. The rest of it happens in the neighborhood north and west of the stadium, where people who live there put a folding sign at the end of the driveway and stand next to it, and where a whole small economy runs for about five hours, seven or eight Saturdays a year.

Pete has paid the same family on the same street since 2011. Fifty dollars, and it was forty for the first six years, and the woman who takes the money was in high school when they started and now brings her own kid out to the curb.

Ed Nowak cannot do the walk from the neighborhood anymore, so Mike drops him and Nora at the corner and goes and parks alone, which he mentioned twice on the phone and then said was not a big deal.

The visiting allotment is about three thousand seats in a wedge of the upper corner, and getting to it involves a climb, and then, when you think you are done climbing, more of it. Denny’s son-in-law does that walk with him now. Ed Nowak has done it with a hip and a knee that both have hardware in them and has never once let anybody put him in a different seat.

It is a good view of a football game. You are high enough to see the whole thing laid out, the far sideline is a long way off, and the wind up there in the third week of September is either nothing at all or the only thing anybody talks about on the way home.

The other thing about the corner is that three thousand people in a stadium of eighty thousand do not carry. Older Spartans will tell you that in 2016 the rain flattened everything else and you could actually hear the visiting section, and that this was unusual, and that they have not really heard it since.

Ed brought up the library.

The band gets seated on the opposite side from the visitors, which is standard, and which means the Spartan Marching Band spends the afternoon a long way from the three thousand people who most want to hear it. They will play the fight song after every score, if there are scores. Kayla’s brother is driving down from Grand Rapids to watch her.

Nobody in the visiting section on Saturday will be there because of a projection. Notre Dame lost to Miami by thirty-six and lost at home to a Wisconsin team nobody has ranked and then beat Rice by forty-two, and Michigan State has beaten Grambling State and Eastern Michigan, and the honest position on all of that is that nobody who has bought a ticket has any idea. Most of them said so themselves. A few of them also said, later in the same phone call and in a smaller voice, that this one felt different to them, and then immediately said they knew better than to think that.

Jerry Boughner has run the Sportsman’s on Main Street in Owosso for twenty-two years and Saturday is one of his four or five best days of the calendar. Notre Dame weekends are good for him for the same reason they are expensive for Steph Ochoa: a lot of people in mid-Michigan want to be around other Michigan State fans for this one and cannot justify four hundred dollars and six hours in a car.

Lonnie Reeves will be at a bar too, in Muskegon Heights, which he has been doing since 1989 because he never had the money and then never had the time and then had grandkids on Saturdays. He is 63, retired off the buses, and he has never been to Notre Dame Stadium.

The lot does not empty for an hour and change no matter what happens, so the first part of the drive home is not a drive at all, it is sitting in a field in the dark listening to somebody else’s radio through a car window.

Then it is the Toll Road, and then it is the two-lane part again, worse at night, and then it is the state line with nobody honking, and then Kalamazoo, and then whatever is left. Pete gets back to Grand Ledge around eleven thirty if it goes normally. Rochelle and Andre are in Detroit closer to midnight. Denny will be asleep in the passenger seat before Three Rivers, which he volunteered without being asked, and which he said his son-in-law gives him grief about.

Everybody was asked some version of the same question this week, which is why they keep doing this, and almost nobody answered it usefully. Ed said it was a nice ride if the weather’s right. Marcy said her family stops at Redamak’s. Rochelle said her brother likes to leave early. Denny did the arithmetic out loud and said it wasn’t good.

Steph Ochoa was the only one who took a run at it, and she did it at the end of a phone call, after she had already said goodbye once.