'Ray Bucknell

The highly anticipated road trip to Lewisburg was as good as advertised. RoopDogg, UNICorn, and I had a great time cheering Bucknell to their second consecutive Patriot League championship and NCAA tourney berth.

It’s pretty neat to see a small town go crazy for their local team. Every store on the main street in Lewisburg was decorated with Bucknell Bison colors and posters. Even the movie theatre had “Go Bison” listed on the board advertising the movie times.

The lovely Sojka Pavilion was packed to capacity with just over 4,000 fans. There were a decent number of Holy Cross fans as well. I was shocked that Holy Cross sent a pep band all the way from Worcester, MA and that their seats were right behind one of the two Bucknell student sections. That would be bad news if an opposing pep band sat with the students in the Big Ten. However, I promised RoopDogg that I would not be a band snob, so I'll end my band related comments there. Some of the Holy Cross students came dressed in pretty lame costumes. They wore purple sweater vests over top of white collared shirts. They also brought plastic swords and shields and wore sunglasses. I guess this is because their school color is purple and their nickname is the Crusaders. I thought it was lame. Unfortunately I was not able to get a picture of the ugly costumes. Thankfully, the Bucknell students reminded them before the game that they wear purple.

The game itself was tightly contested until Bucknell started to pull away with ten minutes left. At the end of the game, we rushed the court to celebrate a second consecutive Bucknell championship and undefeated conference record (17-0). Here are some pictures from the game. My camera battery started to die just before the game, so I was only able to take a few pictures.

Outside the lovely Sojka Pavilion (pronounced Soy-ka)


The Sojka Psychos are ready for the game to start





UNICorn, RoopDogg’s friend, RoopDogg, and me


“I believe that we have won!” I took this picture just before we stormed the court, but RoopDogg almost pushed me over while I was taking the picture because he was in a huge hurry to get down to the floor.

Of course, any great championship must be celebrated with a night of crazy drinking. We spent a significant portion of the evening drinking with some of RoopDogg’s friends from college. We played Kings (Circle of Death) a few too many times and instituted several rules that involved drinking Jager shots. After doing this for a few hours, we were all pretty hammered. RoopDogg was by far the worst though. He started randomly yelling out “We’re talking about the fuckin’ Bison and shit” over and over for the rest of the night.

As we decided to wrap up the drinking game and head to the bar, I thought it would be smart to drunk-dial some people. I started with Mouse and Mpls Ju since I figured that they would enjoy a call. Neither one of them answered their phone. We ended up leaving Mouse a pretty raunchy message. When I say we, I mean RoopDogg and UNICorn. I don’t even remember what they said, but Mouse called back like ten minutes later to let me know that the message was somewhat insulting. Sorry Mouse! I’m sure it was also somewhat funny!

Just before we left for the bar, RoopDogg puked. I think this is the first time I had ever seen him puke, but given the number of Jager shots he had, I was not surprised. At this point of the evening, I called Hawkeye to remind her of what she was missing since she decided not to join us for the road trip. I think she enjoyed talking to the three of us because she was laughing almost the entire time I was talking to her. I decided to stop the drunken dials at this point because I was bound to get into trouble if I continued, especially since UNICorn and RoopDogg kept trying to take the phone away during the calls.

RoopDogg's college friends and the three of us from CT finally made our way to the bar around midnight, but it was surprisingly empty. It was the start of Spring Break at Bucknell, so the two campus bars were not that crowded. I was somewhat surprised since it looked like 25% of the entire student population, if not more, was at the game. There are only 3,500 students at Bucknell according to RoopDogg. Also, there were like 4 girls in the entire bar, so it was a sausage fest. Apparently, Thursday night was a much better bar night based on the crowd at this bar the night before. However, we got over the disappointment and ordered some drinks and started playing some pool since the bar was not that exciting and there was no good music. I am a terrible pool player, but UNICorn was my teammate and he is pretty good. Between the few games we played as teammates on Friday and Saturday night, we only lost once. RoopDogg and his new and improved “finesse game” was no match for my “I have no fucking clue how to play this game” strategy. Amazingly, I carried the team on Saturday because he was way too drunk. The second game we played on Saturday was especially funny. While UNICorn was breaking a new game, I went to the bathroom. When I came back, it was my turn. Three solids and no stripes had been knocked into the pockets. I assumed that we were solids, but I asked Brad to confirm. He had no clue. I then asked the girl who shot after Brad what they were, and she didn’t know either. Hello! Only one of them knocked in a ball. It’s not that hard to figure out. Well, UNICorn was quite incapacitated the rest of the evening. Every time it was his turn, he would ask me if he was supposed to hit stripes or solids. Every fucking time. I carried us to a stellar 3-1 record on Saturday night.

After the bar closed, we joined RoopDogg for one of his post bar college traditions. We made the 1-1.5 mile walk over to “Drunken Donuts”. That walk and the greasy food ended up sobering me up a bit. However, it did little good for UNICorn or RoopDogg. RoopDogg snuck in some liquor so that he could spike his coffee. When we left, UNICorn tried to take advantage of the drive thru service. We were traveling on foot. UNICorn decided to get around this by making car noises so that they would think there really was a car in the drive-thru. Surprisingly, it didn’t work.

The long walk back to the hotel was filled with several “We’re talking about the fuckin’ Bison and shit”.

So this story is not as crazy as Mouse’s recent bar night. However, I don’t think Ill ever have that insane of a night. You win Mouse.

I’ll let UNICorn and RoopDogg add comments with any good stories that I missed.