My first brush with big-time college football was in 1973, soon after I’d been hired on as a sportswriter for the Lake County News-Herald. My new responsibilities included covering Ohio State University home games, so I dutifully showed up early at “The Shoe,” as the horseshoe-shaped stadium has long been affectionately known, for the season opener against Minnesota.

I was strolling through the upper reaches of the stadium to get a feel for the place, watching the pregame pageantry and talking to some of the fans, when the OSU band – dubbed “The Best Damn Band in the Land” a few years earlier by legendary coach Woody Hayes – struck up the first strains of “Carmen Ohio,” the school’s alma mater.

What happened next was beyond my experience.

Understand, my only previous encounter with co

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