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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Brawl looks all
too familiarWEREN'T we just here? Didn't this just happen? There was the surge again, the ferocious ebb and flow of a mob out of control. It's familiar now. I barely blinked an eye.
I'm saddened by this. Does anyone else feel this way? I'm sad. I sigh. A riot again. An emotional, dangerous, violent free-for-all. Again.
And this time every TV set in America was on.
It shouldn't be this way. That shouldn't be the story. There were the great quarterbacks, Houston's Jackie "Battling" Battle. Interceptions. Touchdowns. OT.
It was wonderful.
There was The Drive (Timmy Chang has something in capital letters now, just like Elway). Catches by Jeremiah Cockheran and Jason Rivers. And at the end of regulation it was Houston's Vincent Marshall, who ran so fast he pulled a hamstring crossing the goal line to send it into three OTs.
What a game.
It was great, and after Houston was stopped short, Hyrum Peters took off his helmet and leaped into the sky and hung there, throwing his hat in the air.
It was time to write something good.
Ten seconds later, something bad happened.
Is anyone else saddened by that?
"I know everybody feels bad about it," Hawaii Bowl executive director Jim Donovan said, after heads had cooled.
We should. We all should. It's understandable, after four quarters and three overtimes. It's emotional, and any little thing could light the spark. Put yourself in these guys' places and you might do the same thing. Any of us might.
Except it's three times now. It's familiar now. We can't stand for this. We're better than that.
All of us are.
The worst part may have been a fan, a guy I noticed in one of the front rows during the game. He looked like one of the contenders for a Vili look-alike contest, and he was on the field, in the middle of the madness, insanity in his eye, chasing full speed after a Houston player who had sat out the game in street clothes.
I don't think he was trying to wish the guy "Merry Christmas."
How does it get to that point?
"The video cameras were rolling, so we're going to look at it and see what got it going and who kept it going," Houston coach Art Briles said.
Here's what that will show: me doing a backpedal better than Abraham Elimimian. Beyond that it might be anyone's guess. All we know is that it happened, and it shouldn't have.
It shouldn't overshadow what a great game this was, and it probably won't. But neither should it be swept under the rug.
We'll still remember that Hawaii came through here, beat a Houston team that was pretty good. It looked like 2001 again -- and that means the quarterback played his way out of a shadow that has haunted him for two years.
Chang was that good last night. During The Drive, he was Rolo good.
Hawaii's offense is back.
They said there were 25,551 there. (Did the stadium look half-full to you? Apparently, the problem was that more than 25,000 easily confused football fans actually showed up at Vili's house). The Hawaii Bowl was a great game.
It looked like 2001 again.
That's the best Christmas present of all.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com