Stadium tickets were forfeited for hospital check-in sheets. The brass of the marching band traded in for machine beeps. We couldn’t all watch together. My dad, aunt, and grandmother sat with my granddad and watched Baylor dog walk the Rebels.

It was January 2, 2022. The day Ole Miss lost the Sugar Bowl. The day we lost Poppy.

Football is not meant to be saccharine. Sap has no place on the field. But football is meant to be sincere, at least when it’s at its most captivating. And love for a team, the kind that ripples through generations, must be sincere, too. Pop’s was. Without question.

Mine was not. My interest in football comfortably qualified as the opposite of sincere. It was couched on pretense — an excuse to get out of town when I felt like it, to see a college campus I could imagine myself into. I didn’t go to Ole Miss for undergrad, and my home game attendance record in college wasn’t impressive. Games were social events. Pregames that ended in the third quarter.

I found my way to Ole Miss for law school after Pop passed away. And this time around, I had a lot fewer absences at home games.

Some asked: Why do you care about football now?

Because our ties to the ones we’ve lost do nothing but dwindle after they’re gone. Because you can’t make new memories with them, but you can make new memories about them.

Because as saccharine as it sounds, it’s nice to think that we’re watching the same game, just from different seats.

January 2, 2026. Four years since the Rebels’ last Sugar Bowl appearance. Four years since my mom came into my bedroom and broke the heartbreaking news.

My aunt sends me a text, photos of red and white flowers and a blue Ole Miss flag at his stone.

“I know he’s cheering on the Rebels today,” I say.

She responds: “Best seat.”

This time, the game goes much different. A hard fought victory over Georgia that few bet on. A win I felt unqualified to hope for until it happened.

Ole Miss is by no means the only college football program that inspires generational devotion. But I will argue that its commitment to those in the Ole Miss family makes these ties stronger. After fans bellowed the Hotty Toddy chant in the Caesars Superdome during postgame and players took the mic, the atmosphere turned somber. Defensive tackle Will Echols gave a tribute to Corey Adams, the defensive lineman from New Orleans killed in a shooting in July, and his mother, who was in the stands.

The Rebels’ season, Echols said, has been dedicated to Adams. Echols’ speech epitomized the enduring connection sports can bring us to those who are gone.

College football means very little to a whole lot of people (most humans who have ever lived, and will ever live). Even fewer care about a team out of Oxford, Mississippi.

But I was very lucky to know a man who cared a lot about that team, and, in doing so, gave me a way to feel tethered to him again. To make a memory about him, even if I couldn’t watch it with him. A memory much sweeter than the last Sugar Bowl.