[Ed(S): Kelsey Zimmerman is a writer/photographer from Ann Arbor who's currently completing her MFA in writing at Iowa State. A game at Iowa City was too good to pass up, and her self-justification of going to write up her experience was too good for us to pass up. You can find more of her stuff at kelseyzimmerman.com. Photos herein are hers.]

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Friday I burned myself while rushing to bake a batch of cookies. I didn’t run my hand under cool water soon or long enough in the aftermath, rushing to finish the cookies for a friend’s birthday, and ended up with an inch-long red stripe on my left index finger.

Saturday I drove to Kinnick to watch Michigan win a football game. Over the summer, I’d wondered what it might be like to go to an away game alone, how opposing fans might treat me both as a Michigan fan and as a woman attending a game by herself; the idea made me nervous, but what is being a writer for if not for putting myself in uncomfortable situations and then writing about it?

Driving into Iowa City is surprisingly similar to driving into Ann Arbor; the corn and soy fall away, leaving the highway thickly lined with trees. I stopped for gas 20 minutes outside town and saw Hawkeye tailgaters in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express. I saw a billboard that read, “TIME ENDS! ETERNITY FOREVER.” It was probably some sort of religious shtick about how we all die but heaven is permanent, but it seemed poetic too, the sort of aphorism you might find on a grave, or a birthday party, or an essay about not understanding how to feel about anything anymore.

[The rest after THE JUMP]

The atmosphere at Kinnick was, predictably, electric. Enviably the student section was filled up when I made it to my seat at 10am, an hour before kickoff. Michigan students don’t make it on time to noon games, which yes, start even earlier in the Central Time Zone. There were more Michigan fans than I expected — the crowd was maybe 85-15, Hawkeyes — and there were more gimmicks in the pre-game than I expected, too. Fireworks, hawk cries played over the speakers, and an actual hawk that flew from the press box down to handlers on the field. It was fun! The crowd managed to color-coordinate by section, another impressive feat hard to imagine with Michigan’s w(h)ine-and-cheese crowd.

There was a familiar complaining amongst the Hawkeye fans I was surrounded by, an automatic self-defense mechanism that went into effect early in the game. “Can’t win a game if the defense gives up 5, 6, 7 yards on first down,” said a fan behind me. The crowd seemed to turn on their team quickly. Here’s another stadium packed to the gills with fans who have seen some shit over the past two decades.

Then, of course, there were the novelties: Anytime Iowa enjoyed some remote success a 15-year-old boy behind me screamed, “WHO’S YOUR DADDY???” and took a swig of a White Claw.   The whole crowd stood most of the game, nary a “Down in front!” to be heard. The emcee played, “Pump It Up” near the end of the 1st half; “That’s our song!” I exclaimed to no one in particular. Later in the game, the emcee played “It’s Corn!” the viral TikTok sensation most of my friends have been obsessed with for weeks that seemed to garner no reaction from the crowd.

***

Part of my inspiration for this piece was to see how people would treat me; the somewhat dissatisfying answer is that I was almost uniformly ignored. A handful of times I tried to engage with Hawkeye fans sitting beside me—after the touchdown McCarthy threw where the replay certainly seemed to show McCarthy definitively forward of the line of scrimmage at the time of the pass. I told them Ferentz should have called a time-out or thrown his challenge flag (neither of which appeared to happen from the stands) and was met with stony silence. It didn’t seem to me like I was cheering that much, but after the game I realized I’d partially lost my voice, so…I won’t say I could blame Hawkeye fans for ignoring me.

The refs got a lot of grief in this game. It feels very strange to watch a Michigan football game and get the sense the refs are favoring us, but it was hard to avoid sitting in the stands of Kinnick. An insidious misogynistic undercurrent threaded through some of the abuse levied at the refs; early in the game, crowd chatter centered on the “female ref who doesn’t know what she’s doing.” After one penalty, a man a few rows back screamed, “FUCK YOU, BITCH!” repeatedly at the top of his lungs, and it did not feel great, I’ll tell you that. I watched three young teen girls sitting next to me closely for a reaction. They were all pale, corn-fed Iowa girls, and it was impossible to tell from the expressions on their faces whether they registered the messages for what they were, if they understood it was wrong, if they knew the world around them was always quietly shaping them, for better or worse.

Kinnick, and Iowa, aren’t special in this regard. I’m sure you could hear insults like those at any Big Ten stadium, including Michigan Stadium; really, probably at any stadium in the country. I tell myself people who throw these insults are the minority, and believe that’s true; what’s much harder is gauging who might be thinking them. That is the dark heart of going to an away game alone, or any game at all: all those tens of thousands of people, strangers who could be anyone, in one place. It’s a beautiful thing, but frightening, too.

The game itself: pretty unremarkable! When Iowa finally scored in the fourth quarter and gained some momentum, the crowd came alive; it never matched the ardor of the game’s opening moments, but for fifteen minutes, Iowa fans did their best to make a difference, even if it seemed highly improbable this Iowa team could score three 4th-quarter touchdowns. The burn on my hand began to tingle. That’s what happens when you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you so many times you can feel its thinness beneath your feet.

Then Spencer Petras threw an incompleted pass short of the sticks on 4th-and-2 and the receiver was called for offensive pass interference. More dark mutterings against the refs. The game was not over, and Michigan would have a 3-and-out on their next drive, giving Iowa the ball right back, but fans began streaming out of their seats en masse. Finally, our defensive line had had enough, reaching Petras four straight times, branding an exclamation point onto it: Time ends!

“There you go, that’s how you do it,” a remaining Hawkeye fan said, the sarcasm so syrupy that at first it was almost too slippery to catch. “That’s exactly how you start an epic game-winning comeback.”

“Your O-line gave up,” I said to him and his friend, unhelpfully. He gave me a look and did not reply.

***

The Harbaugh era has exorcized most of our familiar Michigan -fan demons, if with a rather uneven, “two steps forward, one step back” approach. We win (most) of our ugly road games. We have finally won another Big Ten Championship. The first year I was half-interested in Michigan football, in 2003, I was indoctrinated to believe—for good reason—that winning a Big Ten Championship was something that Michigan football teams did every few years by divine right. Then eighteen years go by. Time ends! The disastrous 2020 covid-19 season may or may not have been an aberration; what’s important is that it happened during a year with a permanent asterisk beside it and inspired the necessary changes to make 2021 happen.

Still I caught myself during and after the game with a twinge of dissatisfaction, like winning on the road at Iowa for the first time since 2005 wasn’t enough, like we haven’t lost about a million first road games of the season. Times end, things change, but this doesn’t. Maybe all ends and beginnings really do is unearth anew the problems that never really leave us. I want to be a happy Michigan fan when the times are good, and I’m not sure I know how to, or if I ever did. Eternity forever.