Nothing shows students’ love for Hawkeye Football better than our alarm clocks on Saturday mornings: dials that never see a pre-9:00 setting, programmed at seven or even six a.m.; students who instinctively “snooze” three or four times, leaping out of bed, ready to celebrate. Nothing proves a teenagers love, like a positive response to an early wakeup.

In some rooms, no alarm is needed. For them, a wakeup call comes in the form of a relentless knocker beating on the door and screaming, “Get up! It’s GAME DAY!” On any other day, such an early racket would be received with serious disapproval, (if not violence,) but the looming thrill of Hawkeye Football seems to make it somehow acceptable.

There’s no bad seat in Historic Kinnick Stadium, but when all 70,000 fans finally funnel in, it’s obvious that the student section has the best seats in the house. Filled with thousands of roaring, rowdy, (and often intoxicated) Hawkeyes, the “Hawks’ Nest” is the most vicious, noisy and energizing place to watch an Iowa Football game.

The party doesn’t end in the stadium. For most Hawkeyes, a day that started hours sooner than usual will also finish several hours later, and our alarms clocks, set so early that morning, will lay silent well into the afternoon on Sunday.