Small to Important Pt 2 - Buffaloes and Scout

My second “small thing” was my beloved college football team losing a game in 2016.  Since 2001, my beloved Colorado Buffaloes have been a disaster for the most part on the football field.  They have had two winning seasons and been to only two bowl games in that time.  They have been a far cry from the dominant team they were when I was finishing high school and during my four years there of college.  So, when they had a surprisingly terrific season in 2016 and were playing in the Pac12 title game for a chance to be in the Rose Bowl, I was pretty excited.  I had a family member working in a Pac12 athletic department at the time and told me that, if Colorado won, she could get our family tickets to the game, VIP passes to the Rose Parade and a bunch of other awesome stuff.  Suffice to say, I was excited about the possibilities.

Well, Colorado did not win (they didn’t even come close) and so there went the Rose Bowl.  I was disappointed but not crushed.  I’ve come a long way from when that would have bummed me out for days on end.  (Yay for maturity!). Anyway, a few days after the Buffs lost, my wife and I got a message from a pet rescue center about a litter they had received that might fit with our family.  You see, in the months leading up to this time, my wife had finally prevailed upon me that it was time for us to get a dog and and we had started working with this rescue center about our family, our house, etc.  So that next Saturday, we headed to an event with this center at a local Petsmart where we met Scout.  She was about 3 months old at the time and as soon as my wife picked her up, we knew we were coming home with this pup.  The thing is though that we would never have chosen to adopt a dog at that time if we were going to be leaving on a trip to California just a few weeks later.

In the seven years since, Scout has changed so much about our lives.  She has changed the rhythms of our lives, our vocabulary (goob morning instead of good morning for example), and many of our priorities.  But most of all she has been a vital companion for each of us when we have needed her.  With all that has taken place in our lives since 2016 from specific situations in our family to global things such as Covid-19, she has been a beautiful and necessary presence for us in our lives.

So as much as I wanted Colorado to win the Pac12 and go to the Rose Bowl, I am really glad they lost because if they hadn’t, Scout would never have become part of our family.  A small thing...a football game being lost...turned into something far more significant.