Things weren’t going well.

I’d needed to visit three different bars before I found one broadcasting the Carolina-Kentucky game, so I managed to miss an entire quarter of a Gamecock football game for the first time since, uh, ever. And once I arrived at what appeared to be the only place in Upstate South Carolina that was carrying us, I found every other USC fan in Greenville clogging up the joint. Seats were harder to find than sober college students at a Carolina Cup horse race.

Yes, that was me standing on my own two feet around the bar for most the game. I happen to like standing when I’m watching games at Williams-Brice Stadium, but when I’m watching a game on the tube and trying to eat chicken wings without spilling hot sauce on the heavily hair-sprayed woman squeezed in beside me? Not so much. On top of that, the Gamecocks were fumbling the football around Commonwealth Stadium like it was an airline ticket to Saudi Arabia. Nobody wanted to touch the thing. It was like watching one of those Indiana Jones movies where a character gets so knotted up about not dropping some very important historical artifact that he can’t help but drop it.

But all of that was easy enough to endure compared to what came next. It was the third quarter, we were up by six and driving deep into Wildcat territory. The vibe at the bar had begun to drift into a kind of casual comfort, and people were ordering more drinks and thinking less about the game itself and more about trying not to spill sauce on the person crammed up next to them. You could feel the icy tension beginning to lift, like the sun peeking out of the clouds after a cold rain. That’s when my wife almost killed our entire season.

I was gnawing nonchalantly on a spicy teriyaki wing, watching us churn up first-down yardage, when my wife leaned over and said, “I know it’s stupid to say this, but I feel like there’s absolutely no way we could lose this game.” I nearly choked on the bone.

I don’t even have to tell you what came next, do I? On the very next play – and I do mean the very next play – Demetris Summers fumbled. It was one of those miraculous fumbles where the player almost appears to be untouched, like a sudden, stiff breeze swooped down and flipped the ball onto the ground. Clearly the entire world was now against us, including God and all the angels in heaven. I had to go stand in the bathroom to compose myself after that, which I guess would be the adult equivalent of ordering yourself to a timeout chair.

It didn’t help. Since I’d already sent myself to timeout, I just decided to stop acting like an adult entirely, and for the first time this entire season, I reverted into my old enemy, Irrational Fan. Irrational Fan is, quite honestly, a terrible excuse for a human being. I personally despise Irrational Fan, even though he’s apparently a large part of who I am from September through November. Irrational Fan shows up unannounced whenever Carolina is playing uninspired football, and he sighs continuously, mutters what would be expletives if anyone could actually understand the words, and complains about every dropped pass, every missed tackle and every play call, even if that play call was somewhat successful. Irrational Fan is more negative than a Jim DeMint-Inez Tenenbaum ad.

I started doing what Irrational Fan does, specifically an awful lot of loud, long sighing. Think Al Gore during the 2000 presidential debates, except this time, Al Gore is attempting to listen to George Bush’s answers while also impersonating a three-year-old after being told he can no longer watch Sponge Bob Square Pants. That was me. It was just the kind of impossibly noticeable, temper tantrum-type stuff that I thought would make the big-haired lady beside me glance in my direction with a look on her face that suggested she’d rather flip through a David Letterman swimsuit calendar than be stuck next to me. Which she did. Which only made me sigh louder and longer.

Shockingly, my decision to wallow in immaturity did nothing to help our fortunes on the field. Kentucky would go on to take a 7-6 lead after a numbing 23-play, 96-yard drive that took up almost an entire quarter. I haven’t seen a drive last that long since the last time I followed my grandfather on a trip to the beach. Meanwhile, we started throwing so many interceptions I thought Charlie Whitehurst had secretly taken the field in a Carolina uniform. The lady beside me hated my guts, I had embarrassed my spouse, I didn’t have a place to sit and our season was starting to look deader than Ben Affleck’s career. It doesn’t get much lower than that.

At least I wasn’t alone. All around me, grown men – some of them with full mustaches and beards flecked with gray – were pouting, while wives or girlfriends stood behind them, patting their shoulders and wondering why they ever agreed to get bogged down in a relationship with a toddler. It was like a support group for guys with absolutely no lives who are extraordinarily fortunate that they’re not still single.

At this point, I was already thinking to myself, “In 20 years of watching the Gamecocks, this will positively, unequivocally be the worst loss I have ever witnessed.” Because let’s face it, folks. Kentucky is a bad football team. Kentucky gives new meaning to bad. We need new language to describe how atrocious Kentucky is. Their own mothers won’t even admit to rooting for them. The Wildcats lost at home to Ohio University, for goodness sakes, and I’m not even sure I knew Ohio University actually existed, or that they fielded a football team. Kentucky lost by four touchdowns to Alabama (no, that is not a typo). They lost by FOUR touchdowns to a team we beat like eggs in a Waffle House. What in the world did we think we were doing losing to this team?

Part of the problem was that, in a game where you keep score, it’s kinda hard to win when you can’t score. By the end of the game, we were holding open auditions for quarterback. Dondrial Pinkins was back home in Columbia nursing a sore rotator cuff, Syvelle Newton was on the sidelines with a sprained ankle, and young Blake Mitchell looked more jittery than me after swallowing two venti lattes from Starbucks. In comes Mike Rathe, the fourth-string quarterback, a guy who’s been missing from Gamecock football longer than imaginative play-calling on offense.

So what does Rathe do? Well, you know, exactly what you would expect from your fourth-string guy: He guides us the length of the field for a winning touchdown. Before you know it, it’s Rathe to Williamson in the back of the end zone, ballgame, thanks for coming. True, he almost threw two consecutive interceptions that were dropped only because Kentucky is freakin’ Kentucky, and if there was any team in America more determined to lose that game than South Carolina, it was Kentucky. But still. A guy sits on the bench for a year, hasn’t even warmed up on the sidelines in who knows when, and rolls in to toss a 20-yard touchdown pass while being chased out of bounds by defenders? Come on.

And wouldn’t you know it – suddenly the mood in the bar changes, like we’d all been lying in a hospital bed with a tumor and suddenly received the news that tumors can be cured immediately by drinking beer. Suddenly the only song in my head is “I Hear a Symphony” by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Birds are chirping somewhere. I envision a flowery meadow filled with puppies. If my feet had been hurting, they stop hurting.

In every corner of the place, men are instantaneously transformed into loving, caring husbands and fathers, into gentlemen who nurture their women and set a wonderful example for their children and grandchildren. Immediately, every guy in the place is so embarrassed about how stupid he’d been acting that he tries to act like it never happened, starts cracking jokes and saying stuff like “Whew, I knew we’d pull it out.”

Because, after all, it didn’t happen, did it? Surely I never really sighed all that loudly in a public place. I couldn’t have. I didn’t impersonate a Sponge Bob-deprived three-year-old – it only seems that way in retrospect. I mean, I was mildly perturbed for a second, but it wasn’t much of an issue. Seriously.

After that preposterous, totally unpredictable touchdown, I felt only love, love for everybody and everything. I loved the gigantic hairdo beside me! I loved each and every chicken wing I’d ever eaten! I loved standing up! When I look back on it all now, I know that Toby Keith had it right, after all.

I loved this bar.