Sidelines
THIS is a column about big noise and broken-field runs. About the excitement of sprinting free on the turf and hearing the world explode all around you. About a stadium that gets so wrapped up in the moment it makes you realize that this is why you go to these games. For this. To feel these chills. To be there. To watch this, and hear it, and feel it. Big plays bring
stadium to lifeAnd Hawaii will need all of this tomorrow, against Alabama.
The way it needed it, the way it happened for the first time this season, last week against Cincinnati.
Did you feel it? The stadium was alive, roaring and jumping, in those glorious final minutes before everything got ugly. The place was shaking. People were actually jumping, up and down and up and down. So caught up in the excitement they just had to jump, they just had to go with it, and let it out. Everywhere, chicken skin, sweeping over the place like an uplifting mist.
"Oh, it was big-time, man," said UH linebacker Chris Brown. "It was just, you know, just exciting. I'm glad I got to help the team out to electrify the crowd. It was just really ... man, it was just ... the crowd wen got into it. And that was the whole thing. And even announcers said it, and everybody. Oh, man, the roar, you know, helped us. Just to push harder."
These plays in those games can do that.
GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@ STARBULLETIN.COM
Hawaii's Chris Brown made a key interception and ignited the crowd Saturday against Cincinnati.
"Felt like, Man! We can do this, we can win this game," Brown said.
This hadn't happened yet this season, not at Aloha Stadium. Not like this. Not with average crowds and ho-hum foes. Not until now. Not until the week before 50,000 finally fill it up, finally descend on Aloha Stadium for the game against Alabama.
It was Brown, the linebacker, the stuffer, the plugger, who found himself in the middle of one of those runs. One of those runs that can change a game, a team, that can take everyone in the stadium along for the ride.
Brown, the guy who started the season as the hero of the defense, on the cover of the media guide, on the lists for all the awards. Brown, the guy who was ending it as a situational player.
"That was big for me," he said, that run, this play. "Because you know they take me out a lot of times in the nickel. For even because Keani Alapa's better, a better dropper, he's been around (pass defense) longer than I have.
"So that was big-time for me, and I knew exactly what I had to do. And once I saw that guy break, you know I said I had to get my break. I saw that ball coming out, I said no, this is mine. This is my chance to show that I can drop. And I got that pick."
And he ran.
And the stadium ran with him.
"When Chris Brown intercepted that ball," June Jones said, "it was a different crowd."
CHAD OWENS HAS felt that feeling more than once. And he felt it again last week, for the first time in a long time. Standing there, waiting for that first kickoff. Cutting up into the heart of the coverage. The game was different, the buzz was there, just by his mere presence, simply by his standing back there in those seconds before the ball is kicked.
You can't tell me that you can take anyone else and do what Chad Owens does. Well, you can tell me that. But I'll never believe it. Never. You don't play these games on paper and you don't play them in practice. Numbers and averages may add up to wins, but I'd trade all the common sense in the world for one broken-field run -- just one -- that makes a team believe and a stadium detonate.
"I'm there for a reason," Owens said. "You know, I'm trying to make something happen."
"If I'm trying to do too much -- I admit, I try to do too much sometimes, but ... sometimes I'll get tackled for a 5-yard loss. But sometimes I'll bust one for 60 yards again, you know? So, it all works out."
He does things that make you stop breathing, the way he stops and starts, and stops again -- as if he just thought of something. He jumps sideways and finds himself facing backward, and then somehow he's sprinting through it all. This is excitement, and the crowd senses it, and everyone is into it now. The crowd is into it now.
"It just makes everything better," Owens said. "Everyone gets involved, and ... and it's fun, because I love that."
Last week, he did it again. Owens had a punt return of 21 yards. Then, he went for 38.
He got people buzzing. Brown's return blew them away. And when Hawaii's defense needed to make a stand, the atmosphere was absolutely stirring. UH had awakened the echoes.
"If it was like that every series," said defensive end Travis LaBoy, still taken aback by the power of it, "who knows what would happen?"
Heading into the biggest game of the season, a full house against Alabama, Aloha Stadium was finally alive. It felt like it hadn't in a long time. Plays like this will do that, in games like these.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com
