Arizona Football: Part 2

So as we saw in the last post, Arizona was sitting pretty at 3-1 and 1-0 in conference play, right on the cusp of being ranked again for the first time in a long time. The next game was a very important one for the cats, a showdown with the always dangerous Washington Huskies, who had one of the best quarterbacks in the pac-10, Jake Locker. To be completely honest, this game shouldn’t have even been close. Arizona totally outplayed Washington, but again, because of poor road play, and the inability to close out games in a hostel environment, we allowed the Huskies to hang around the entire game, and what happened at the end is still something I cannot explain, even until this day. With Arizona up 33-29 with under three minutes left in the game, Foles threw a bad ball to a falling Dealshaun Dean. The ball “bounced off” his foot right into the arms of a waiting Washington defensive lineman, who caught it, and ran it all the way back for a touchdown. The Wildcats fell behind 36-33 and couldn’t get over the roar of the opposing crowd or the intimidating field and fell by that score. This is the kind of football that we are to familiar with at Arizona, seeing a team that should be good, choke. However, I was determined to see this team through. After a bye week, it was finally time to come to our home stadium and for our home Zona Zoo of 10,000. It was a big game as we found ourselves at one and one in conference play. Stanford came in with one of the best running ends in the conference with Toby Gerhardt. It was a back and forth game the entire time and Stanford looked like they were gonna pull away until the crowd got loud and you could feel the energy lift back into Arizona as they stormed ahead and pulled out the victory 43-38. And finally after two more great home victories, we found ourselves at eight and two, and five and one in conference play. This was also the closest we had been to first play in years, and was also the first time we were playing as a ranked team since 2000. Needless to say this looked like it could be the year to go to the first Rose Bowl in school history. Oh how wrong we could be. We had four games left the on the schedule next week at Cal, home against the first place Oregon, and then we finished our games on the road at our arch rival ASU, and then at USC. All we needed to do is beat Oregon and USC and just win one of the other two games, and the pac-10 crown would be ours. Much easier said than done. Over the past few weeks, we have seen the true determination of this team, and also see how the Wildcats could go through tremendous heartbreak and sorrow.