Nov 29, 2016 3 min read

The end of November means college football’s regular season is winding down, and it’s been a lot of fun. I love going to games and committed to buying season tickets a few years ago. It’s terrific fun to tailgate with friends, see the marching band perform and watch the action in person. That doesn’t mean I don’t record the games and watch them when I get home to see what I missed on instant replay.

A friend of mine buys six tickets for his family. His son is now a college football coach and can’t use his, so I am subletting them. I sure hope he’s a good coach and keeps his job with another school on Saturdays, because I enjoy buying his tickets each year. I have managed to be able to attend all of the home games this year, but some of my friends couldn’t. We started recruiting other friends and relatives to go and laughingly referred to our efforts as K&L ticket brokers (our initials). Our pretend mission statement was to find friends to buy other friends’ unused tickets. If we could recoup their initial investment, so be it. If not, we’d give them away just to fill the stands and have fun. I always marvel at those professional ticket scalpers outside sporting events and concerts. Who are these people? Do they have other jobs during the week, or is this their main vocation? I sold an unused ticket to a scalper once for $10 just before a game with very low attendance. I kept thinking that if I couldn’t find someone in the parking lot to buy it for that price, how could he?

Our ticket shuffling successfully resulted in nearly everyone’s unused tickets being sold or given to other friends this season. But the whole operation hit a snag last week when my friend mailed me her tickets to sell to another acquaintance at our tailgate. It was Tuesday, and the envelope with the tickets hadn’t arrived yet. Wednesday’s mail came, and still no tickets. By Thursday, I was starting to panic. The missing tickets meant one friend was out the money and her tickets, while the other friends were left with no seats for the big game and would have to buy tickets from the real scalpers. I imagined that a real ticket broker would probably be sued in that situation.

The missing tickets never did appear, and we have no idea where the Postal Service sent them. No one showed up in the seats, so it doesn’t appear that they were stolen or sold. We did manage to find yet another friend with two tickets to pair with my one extra. Crisis averted, and we all attended the game with smiles. Thank goodness football season is nearly done. Next season, I’ll leave the wheeling and dealing to the real ticket brokers.

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.