It was the bottom of the eighth. Freshman Peter Ludas sat perched on the edge of a chair, the Southgate dormitory commons room brimming with sweaty first-year students, a stack of pizza boxes piled in the back. The room erupted in cheers.
"There are 12 Yankees fans upstairs somewhere I think," said an anxious Ludas, baseball hat on, grinning. Although this is Duke, many diehard Blue Devil fans traded blue for red Wednesday night.
Students and staff gathered around campus to watch the Boston Red Sox topple the New York Yankees in Game Seven of the American League Championship Series" and many Yankees fans found themselves outnumbered in commons rooms and at the Armadillo Grill, in the McClendon Tower Media Room and at the Bryan Center.
Freshman Andreas Argyris was one of only a handful of Yankees fans in a bleeding red commons room in Blackwell dormitory.
?Everybody hates the Yankees because they can't beat them," he said.
Red Sox fan Sam Broder-Fingert was on his right, jeering at Argyris and defending his native state?s team. An Epworth dormitory resident, he chose to watch the game in Blackwell, where the room was "full of Red Sox fans." Broder-Fingert was also one of several freshmen who professed having placed a higher priority on the game than attending to classwork or extracurriculars.
"Screw [school], baseball comes first," Broder-Fingert said. It was a sentiment shared by Ludas, who had put off studying for a Thursday math exam in order to watch his bedeviled team make it to the World Series for the first time since 1986.
"Maybe later," he smiled.
Junior Laurie Cripe tried to blend both schoolwork and the match-up as she sat doing Chinese homework in a Keohane Quadrangle commons room. The game on loud, she was joined by junior Paul Wrayno and sophomore Mike Kurzer, all three doing homework, all three rooting for the Red Sox.
Kurzer, a self-professed Chicago Cubs devotee, pulled for Boston during the electric series this week for much the same reason as others around campus?a shared hatred for the Yankees.
"I feel bad for the small market teams," said Sterling Brock, who works at the department of laboratory animal research and described himself as "anti-Yankees" as opposed to a "Red Sox fan."
Senior Al Curtis joined a half-dozen others in the television lounge of the Bryan Center, trying to catch three innings before he had to attend a meeting. Sharing the couch was third-year law student Jay Barasch, who, unlike the baseball fanatics finely tuned to the tube, watched simply with the understanding that history was in the making.
"This is one of the biggest events in sporting history," he said.
"This is something they'll talk about for years, something I can tell my grandchildren about."
Back in Southgate, 30 students anxiously huddled around the television.
"There are more people in here than the last two presidential debates," freshman Peter Zolides said.
At midnight's game-ending catch, the room came alive with a flurry of warm bodies, shouting, hugging and squealing. A flock of freshmen ran out of the room, screaming, in search of the Yankees fans upstairs to taunt.
"I can?t study after this!" Ludas yelled.
Zolides had another idea. "We?re going to party like it's 1918,? he said, excitedly. In the moment it was clear that the game was about something else-about athleticism and about history, but also about the bonds of pizza and freshman year, about coming together for a cause, even if it was baseball.
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