Editor’s note: I haven’t updated this since March, but I’m continuing it now in the slow summer months leading up to college football. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. Allow me to present Part 3 of this long and winding tale, here:

Part 3: The Lower Tate Parking Lot

We were wandering the campus at the time, looking for something to do in July in Athens. My buddy was living in Athens, right off Milledge, in a sweet rental that he sublet that summer while he attended summer classes. For editorial purposes, we’ll call him Joe. That’s obviously not his name, but I’ll call him Joe because it’s easy to type and easier to remember for the purposes of this blog.

I had commented to Joe about the idea that the hedges, long since uprooted and missing from the famed Sanford Stadium, were about to be replaced and we decided to walk to the stadium to see the progress. Since we weren’t horticulturalists, it made no sense for us to check up on the work, given that our insight would lead to no greater accomplishments, but we decided to wander down the street and check it out nonetheless.

When we walked into the lower Tate Center parking lot, it popped. Right there in front of us was row after unending row of fresh, small hedges. Mind you, it didn’t seem that these tiny things could grow into the big, sprawling hedges that made up the hedgerows of Sanford Stadium. There were literally thousands of them sitting right there in the lower parking lot, green and waving in the breeze with their tiny sprouts all over. How these small things would turn into the giant, formidable “hedges” was beyond my comprehension….but one thing was for sure, I wanted two of them. And now.

Now, back in the day, before they built it all up, there was the Tate Center, which remains the same, and the UGA Police Station was nestled in a small corner in the intersection of Tate and Stegeman Hall, which was the pale comparison to the modern day Ramsey (SPACenter) Center that is awesome.

I had never noticed the Police Station there, but was about to become quaintly familiar with it. Had I know it was there, and that what I had in the center console of my Jeep at the time, I wouldn’t have entertained the ideas of what comes next. But such is life. If we could go back and do things over again, mistakes wouldn’t be so impactful, would they?

Anyway, we walked up to the verdant rows of shrubbery and inquired with a fluorescent yellow t-shirt wearing worker and asked if we could buy two.

“Hey…so is there any way we could buy a couple of these off of you?” we asked.

“Shit, we have more than we could need here, just come on back down after five and grab a couple. Ain’t no one caring about these damned bushes” he said, seemingly confident they lost hundreds of these each night. He turned from us, carrying two hedges off back to the open stadium gates, which we had formerly climbed a time or two on drunken nights to access the stadium while we ran across the hallowed field, maybe registering the fastest 100 yard dash by a pair of drunks in recorded history.

Me and Joe, the Usain Bolts of Sanford Stadium streaking. You won’t find that in the record books, will you?

There we were once, a pair of young idiots, giggling and laughing as we streaked across the field running to the endzone, pale with lettering and still green under the summer moon over Athens, Georgia. The wind whipped through our ears, the dim images of the silver bleachers shimmering under the moonlight, not a soul around, not a care in the world. We were young then, running with the full confidence in front of us that the world was ours on a string, without consequence. We danced in the endzone, we mimicked our favorite Georgia player, Hines Ward.

We worked out a lot. We played football together, me and Joe, and we stupidly thought if we could form into our soft bodies that we could someday walk on at UGA. Of all the thoughts I’ve had in my life, that one was probably the stupidest. We were neither fast nor otherworldly strong. But a kid can dream, amirite?

To be fair, we mimicked Hines Ward a lot. I wore his number for my intramural jersey, and I considered it a lucky number when playing the lottery. Also 33, for Larry Bird…44 for my deceased roommate…77 because I thought it double lucky. 74, 14, 27…for reasons I won’t talk about here.

As Forrest said, “and that’s all I have to say about that”.

I’ve never hit the Powerball, and suspect I never will, so take that for what it’s worth. It’s worth your money, if I’m being honest.

The world has a funny way of playing into our superstitions, and likewise has a cruel way of crushing them. After all the nights we ran across the field, celebrated like morons, and hooted and hollered as we hit the fifty, the forty, the thirty…we may go…all…the…way…touchdown!

Life was about to crush us, and maybe we deserved it. Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was time.

Maybe it was the tucked-away Campus Police station we’d never noticed before. I’m an insufferable optimist, so, yeah, I’ll go with that. We just were blind to the short arm of the law.

Also, we decided not to come back at 5, but to come back after drinking downtown at Nowhere Bar. That was not the wisest decision among the counsel of learned idiots, to say the least. Nothing that started at Nowhere Bar ended up well, as many of you have learned, as well.

And life…well, life was about to teach us a lesson. A lesson about law, a lesson about life, and a lesson about fatherhood.

If my ears weren’t open before, they were about to be. And as far as we consider the youthful transgressions of our athletes and driving has plagued our program, let’s say I learned the hard way how the ACCPD operates from the inside-out.