Who knew the biggest sports story of the weekend could be the inspiration for TG fiction? Yet here we are...

Once again, I would have the house to myself on a Friday night.

I say this because it had been such a foreign concept to me in years past. My son, Brendan, had for years insisted upon staying home on Friday nights, avoiding our small New York town’s high school football games like the plague. So naturally I stayed home with him.

But now Brendan was Jenna and everything was different. Usually, when he stayed home Fridays, he’d be reading about or watching sports, and we would get ready for tomorrow’s Syracuse football game. Now she’d lost interest in sports, our main bonding mode, and the place football and hockey had once held in Jenna’s heart had been replaced with dance and boys.

I was not angry of Jenna’s shift in interests - no, far from that. I was ecstatic she was finally her true self - indeed, my tears upon seeing her in her homecoming dress three weeks prior had been of joy. But I felt like something was lost.

I cracked open a beer - something I rarely did - and I prepared to watch my alma mater’s game, and I thought about the games Jenna and I had attended at the Carrier Dome, and how we’d shared in the highs and lows of Syracuse football through the years. I shrugged these off, however, as the game began.

The Orange met Clemson, the second-ranked team in the country, and I felt defeat was certain. Syracuse as a national power was something my daughter had never known - our appearance in the Orange Bowl was two years before her birth.

It was a tight game early, which shocked me. My team took a 14-7 lead in the second quarter, and I thought how Brendan would have loved that. But things had changed. The disconnect filled the air even as Jenna was ten miles away. I hoped she was having a good time, but I couldn’t help feeling she was missing one with her father as well.

Last week, Syracuse had played Pittsburgh, and in a way, I had hit rock bottom. The Orange had won and I was happy, and I hummed our fight song as I waltzed into Jenna’s bedroom. I was surprised to find her there.

“Hey, sweetie! We won today!”

“Did we? Cool.”

I had been taken aback. “You didn’t know?”

“Leah and I were out shopping. Didn’t check my phone.”

I looked at my daughter in her white sweater, with her flowing hair and skin-tight jeans - suddenly very aware I was seeing a sixteen-year-old girl. I said nothing.

“Hey, Daddy.” Her voice stopped me from leaving the room.

I returned to see her posing in the mirror in a ballet leotard.

“I bought this today. Do you think it looks good?”

I thought for a minute, and then smiled wryly. “It’s beautiful, sweetheart.” I left a little less whole.

And just like that it was halftime, and ‘Cuse led 17-14. I was anxious. I called some of my college friends, and we dissected the game thoroughly, even as the friend I wanted there most was elsewhere.

I flipped to a local station midway through the third, after Clemson tied the game at 24. The score “Hickory Falls 38, Midway Memorial 28” flashed on the ticker. That meant our town’s game was over. Jenna would likely go for food afterward - probably, I thought, with that boy Galen Hoffbauer whom I secretly loathed.

In the fourth quarter, the good guys kicked a field goal to lead 27-24. I was psyched out of my mind. Here, for the first time in years, I could feel proud of my football team. All those forgettable losses - watched with my daughter, and my wife, whom I sorely missed at this moment - could be washed away if Syracuse could just hold on.

The teams battled and battled and battled. Clemson reached our 41, and their drive began to stall out. If we could hold on third-and-six, they would have to punt.

I knelt down in front of our television. I didn’t care. I wanted this one badly. And not just because Clemson was the Number 2 team in the country.

“Come on, hold ‘em!” The voice was not my own. I turned around and my daughter was energetically clapping her hands together, clad in her gold sweatshirt and leggings from the school’s “Gold-Out.”

Incomplete pass. I clapped my hands. Jenna screamed.

“I had to come home to watch this!” she smiled.

Clemson faked a punt the next play. Incomplete pass. More cheering. Soon the game was over and I was crying and hugging my daughter.

I sat a half hour later, still contentedly sipping my beer, calling my college friends, one-by-one, and sobbing into the phone. Was I sobbing because of the win? Maybe. But it was the sight of my girl prancing about in an orange Syracuse sweatshirt and tutu that produced the feelings that football alone cannot give.