Notre Dame Loses More Than a Game to Syracuse

I can barely bring myself to sit at this keyboard and comment on what I witnessed yesterday. I can say that my family has a devotion to the University of Notre Dame that goes back to my father who, as a boy sitting in his Catholic grade school in a small town in northwest Iowa, would join his fellow classmates in a prayer for an Irish victory every Friday in the fall. That family devotion turned into something more later in life, and I have been privileged to attend, but for perhaps a half-dozen or so, every game in Notre Dame Stadium since 1971. I’ve seen my share of heartbreaking losses…games in which the stakes were (seemingly) much higher. The 58-7 humiliation at the hands of Jimmy Johnson’s Miami Hurricanes, and the 1993 loss to Boston College are the two that stand out the most. There have been others, of course, and they have come far more frequently in the last decade. But at least when the Hurricanes were running up the score, we knew there was a regime ... (link)