We continue our series of guest posts from Gophers fans in Vegas with this effort from Steve Bailey, who tapped this whole thing out on his iPhone. Well done, Steve!
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Oh, the Gophers. Can't anything ever be easy? We had simple requests: fly our discount airline out to the middle of the desert, put a few bucks down on the spread; watch a beatdown of a middling Mountain West team while we clink champagne glasses in the stands and figure out how we're going to make millions at the blackjack table. That's it.
This wasn't supposed to actually require patience or hand-wringing.
As we all know, you don't get to pick and choose which elements of Gopher Nation come with on the road. In fact, the feeling of "my God, they're actually going to blow this" is so familiar that its a requisite addition to any Gopher itinerary, home or away.
But that's both the curse and the blessing of following the Gophers on the road -- the further away you go, the more you feel right at home.
Being on the ground in Vegas for the season opener was interesting. Gopher fans swarmed the city -- maroon and gold covered the casino hotels until the wee hours of the morning and wearing a Minnesota shirt was an instant talking piece for anyone wandering the Strip.
But we also had to endure the hair-pulling, on-field, dark comedy that is Gopher football. Complete with crunch-time personal fouls and eight-yard punts. Honestly, it was hard to expect anything different, but this is VACATION, sorta.
Commiseration is nothing if not a human bonding experience and, even 2,000 miles away, the facepalms and ROFLs felt as familiar as Dinkytown traffic. And really, that's what all of us came out here for - a comfortable slice of home with the possible Hangover stories that accompany a trip to Sin City.
As Randball's Las Vegas correspondent, though, its important to note that Minnesotans really did take this town over. The loudest part of the casino at 5 a.m. was a group of Gopher fans killing it at the craps table and Minnesota apparel was met with awe on the steet. Not disgust.
