A funny thing happened to me Saturday night on the way out of Spartan Stadium following MSU's catastrophic — though, seemingly scheduled — collapse to Notre Dame. As Drew Stanton threw the defeat-clinching interception that fittingly ended MSU's embarrassing performance, my friends and I made our way out of the stadium until a fellow student behind me yelled out, "Oh, what? You're leaving? Good, we don't need you anyway!"

What? At first I thought my ears had deceived me, but no. Here was another student who just witnessed the same hope-crushing, foot-shooting debacle that was the fourth quarter that I had seen, and he couldn't understand why we were leaving?

I know now where he was coming from, and I know many more will probably share his opinion that fans who only want to stick around during the good times are not fans at all, but allow me to plead my case for my fellow "fair-weather" fans.

As fans, we devote a great deal of time, money and emotion into our team in the hopes they will emerge victorious. It just so happens that my friends and I were in line at 5 p.m. — three and a half hours before kickoff — just so we could sit as close to the action as possible. We skipped out on hours of tailgating and sat in the freezing rain — by far the worst weather of any sporting event I've been to — for nearly four hours and never once complained.

Fair-weather fans? It's one thing if your team is legitimately beaten by a better team, in which case you look forward to next week. But to be beating a team for three and a half quarters, to get the hopes up of more than 80,000 fans who, for a few hours, started believing their team was no longer the joke of their conference — only to see it all washed away with the freezing rain? That's not fair-weather — that's just normal. As fans, it's not only our right, but our duty to let our team, our coaches and our school know when we're not happy — even if it means empty seats.

Chris Dawood
international relations junior