Revelry

If you're not a KU Basketball fan then I'm guessing you're really hating my blog right now. Maybe later this week I'll get back to talking about stuff not related to the Jayhawks, but for now this is it. This it a multi-part series, and I'm not really sure how many parts there will be at this point!

After KU made it to the Final Four by beating Davidson, we saw on the news how crazy it was down on Mass Street. There are tons and tons of videos on YouTube of the revelry, which continued throughout the afternoon despite the rain and cold. Although I don't generally love being around obnoxious drunk people, celebrating with other KU fans still looked like so much fun!

After the North Carolina win we really contemplated going downtown to witness the excitement, but it was so late at night by the time the game was over we sort of chickened out. Not only were we pretty tired, but we also didn't want to ruin the post game ritual that we'd established after the two previous tournament games--going to get a concrete at Sheridan's (hey, don't laugh, it apparently worked).

The next day we heard from several friends who'd joined in on the Mass Street street party, and a couple of them said it was one of the most fun experiences they'd ever had. Obviously, I wasn't about to miss the celebration when we won the championship, even though it was late and a work night and pretty chilly outside! After the game we watched the post game interviews, then headed down towards Mass Street with Jake and Amber, parking 5 or 6 blocks away due to all the traffic. It was right around midnight by the time we reached the main part of downtown. People were pouring into the area, and the streets were blocked off so that cars couldn't go through at all. There certainly wouldn't have been any room for driving anyway with all the pedestrians--the streets were literally flooded with people. If you think I'm exaggerating, check out this picture from the Lawrence Journal-World, taken from the top of the Eldridge Hotel.

This is such an amazing shot--you can actually see the thousands of people going on for blocks and blocks! So incredible. I'm so glad someone captured the celebration in its entirety, especially since none of my pictures turned out very good. My friend Vikkie's pictures turned out better--you can check them out here. This is the funniest one though:

The look on my face makes me laugh so hard. Seriously, that's how excited I was!! I just couldn't contain my enthusiasm--can you tell?

The funny thing about this picture of us with Vikkie and Brett is that we just happened to run into them downtown in a sea of 40,000 people. They thought about coming over to watch the game at our house so that they'd already be in Lawrence in case of a celebration, but then they decided not to at the last minute. When they saw all the pictures of Mass Street on the news after the game, they ended up driving into Lawrence from KC at like 11:30 just to be part of the action. It was crazy that we even saw them at all, since we only saw like one or two other couples we knew in that humongous crowd!

Our celebration on Mass Street really just consisted of walking up and down the street, pushing though the massive crowds, people watching, taking pictures and high-fiving complete strangers. Going into any restaurant or bar was out of the question, since lines in front of any open establishment were absolutely massive. It was actually pretty funny because people were pushing through the crowd one way or another, but it didn't seem that most people had any particular destination in mind. The intersections were particularly packed and jubilant, where bands or music were playing and people were singing and dancing in the street. This was the video that I took at the corner of 8th and Mass.



The whole thing was quite fascinating, especially because there was such a diverse cross-section of society present. There were people of every age, color, height, weight, gender, socioeconomic status and degree of body art. It was a people watcher's dream. However, I kind of suspected that some of the people were just there for the party and didn't actually care about KU basketball, especially when we were heading home later that night and heard some Mizzou fans call into a sports radio show to say that they were driving from Columbia to Lawrence that night to come celebrate with the Jayhawks! What self-respecting Missouri fan does that? Some of our friends who were downtown after every one of the games later confirmed that the crowd we saw was a little different than those of the previous nights. On Monday, there were just a lot of people more focused on the party than on the KU victory, which was kind of a bummer. I'm definitely glad we went though--who knows if we'll ever have the opportunity to see something like that again!

We only stayed downtown a little over an hour, and by the time we left it was starting to get really chilly and Chad was starting to get really hungry (what's new). We went by Perkins, and since the parking lot looked a little full we went to IHOP, which was completely packed, so we went back to Perkins, which then looked like it had about 30 people waiting for a table. Since Chad had his heart set on breakfast food, we came home and he cooked himself some hash browns, eggs, sausage and toast at 2 in the morning!! That certainly topped off a pretty crazy night!