Last Night It Felt Like Hokie Fans Finally Got Their Football Team Back…

I believe the best wins in life are the ones you never expect.

I also believe last night’s win by Virginia Tech over N.C. State was something I not only never expected, it’s been 12 hours and I’m still not sure I believe it happened.

Coming into the game, I’ll confess I spent Saturday with the emotional resolve of one preparing to take an exam in a subject I hadn’t studied instead of looking forward to enjoying a college football game. Since the firing of Brent Pry as head coach, my expectations on a scale of 1 to 10 were a negative number.

How, I wondered, had we gone from a powerhouse program in the Commonwealth to such a state of confusion so quickly? The team went from looking kind of OK against South Carolina to downright quitting in the second half of the loss to Vanderbilt and the entire disaster against Old Dominion, prompting the dismissal.

Faced with playing the rest of the season with an interim head coach and hearing rumbles of players entering the transfer portal, the future did not feel very bright. Yeah, they won last week against Wofford, but that’s like getting a birthday card with cash in it from your Grandma. You knew it was coming, so you couldn’t take any stock in believing things were changing.

But last night? THAT was different. We weren’t that fat guy at the pickup basketball game nobody wanted to choose. The guys in the white jerseys and maroon pants all seemed to WANT to be there. They looked like a team. And they showed a fire and enthusiasm that had been sadly lacking in the first 3 games.

Whatever the issue that was causing such lethargy in the first 3 games, it looked like it had been fixed.

Or fired.

Still, the same old “being a Hokie means they’ll break your heart in the end” pessimism was alive and well at the start. When the Hokies took the first lead of the game, I thought “well, that’s a nice surprise.” When they led at halftime it was “well, we led at halftime of the Vanderbilt game too.” Leading in the fourth quarter, that voice in the back of my head said “looks like another one-score loss.”

But none of that happened. Players who in some cases I hadn’t heard of because they hadn’t played much previously stepped up. The defense – which admittedly had an occasional lapse here and there – turned stout against the run when it needed. The offense, who probably got tired of the 3.1 million fans on social media screaming “run the ball,” surprisingly decided…to run the ball.

When the likes of Terion Stewart (who had 175 yards rushing) and Marcellous Hawkins (47 yards) are BOTH averaging over 11.6 yards per carry in the game, good things can happen in the passing game as N.C. State had to defend the entire field of options an offense can throw at you. Kyron Drones took advantage of that with key completions at critical times and threw two touchdown passes.

But the moment of truth was when there was less than a minute to go. The heart was saying “we can stop them” and the head was saying “here comes the heartache,” but Christian Ellis was saying “both of you shut up.”  With the game on the line and on 4^th and 1 on the Hokie 40, Ellis made the play of the game, breaking up a C.J. Bailey pass to set off an explosion of emotion on the sidelines in Raleigh and across homes from the blue waters of the Chesapeake to the hills of Tennessee.

It’s not that the upset win will set the Hokies up to be in the race for some sort of championship down the road. It’s just that after a month of seeing a team that looked disengaged, and hearing about how we had many players who didn’t want to be there, this was a huge and incredibly pleasant surprise.

As you’d expect, it wasn’t but a few minutes after the game ended that people started asking questions about what the win means for the future, does it mean Philip Montgomery now has a chance to be head coach, etc., etc. I don’t know the answer to any of that, nor do I know what’s going to happen next week, or the week after that.

But on one given Saturday night in late September, it felt like we got our team back. A team with heart. A team filled with players who want to be Hokies. A team you can believe has a chance every time it steps on the field.

A team I didn’t think I’d see the rest of this season.

And I’m going to enjoy every second of it this week…