“Who steals barbecue?”

At the end of a roller-coaster Saturday, all I could do was ask myself this one question. Who does that?

My buddies and I cooked up a mean old pig this weekend. We knew ahead of time that the game would probably be one of the worst of the season, so we decided to make our tailgate the best of the season. I think we did a pretty good job of it, despite the arbitrary four-hour tailgate time window. By the time we fought through game-day traffic, hauling a pig cooker constantly loosing temperature (I hear it’s dangerous to leave the gas on in traffic; who knew?), we barely had time to get drunk. Don’t worry guys, we still did!

Yes, let it be known that the N.C. State tailgate is not barbecue friendly. A real pig deserves controlled temperature and time, and I look forward to the day that I can start my pig right where I’m going to tailgate.

As usual, I digress. My buddies and I packed up our supplies and headed toward Carter-Finley along with the rest of the student mob. As a true senior, I must expand upon a point for the sake of more recently arrived students. There was once a day when a student ticket could get you into the stadium, and you would only have to stand in line for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Put that in your mouth and chew on it for a bit. If you were one of those poor kids that stood in the student gate line that wrapped around more than half the length of the stadium, I’m sorry. Please find some hope in the knowledge that it used to not be this way. Now, hold on to that hope, because my story here is going to get worse before it gets better.

I can just imagine a gaggle of evil powers-that-be sitting in a smoky room high atop the Vaughn Towers, looking down on the chaotic sea of red in their newly bowled-out stadium.

“If you give a student a ticket, he’ll ask to get into the game,” cackles a dark figure, and his cronies bellow with twisted laughter.

“If you let him into the game, he’ll ask for a seat,” screeches a second administrator, “and if he has a seat, he’ll ask to leave that seat so he can use the bathroom and buy tasty treats!”

The room fills with more sick mirth at the mockery of a children’s classic, and the dark figures ravage their own tasty treats. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in section eight during the second quarter, trying to fathom why the police won’t let my friends back into the stands to watch the game.

Event One staff say that the section is full, but there’s room for 15 people right next to me if only somebody would clean up where that drunk girl hurled all over the bleachers during the first quarter. So the situation is such that when you leave the section, you are refused entry back into the stands. This results in a pretty nasty situation for a couple of nice folks that are no doubt visiting their daughter during Parents and Families Weekend. Long story short, the mother is splashed with vomit and she can’t leave the stands to clean herself off. What a great way to spend 60 bucks!

The police rope off the section and stand like a mean blue wall, denying section access to any poor sop that couldn’t hold their piss. One kid all painted up for the game tries to slip through the blockade, and a particularly enthusiastic police officer floors him with a nasty blow to the back.

“Way to go, Judge Dredd,” I think to myself.

Meanwhile, back in the tailgate lot, some unidentified criminal decides to break the latch off of my buddy’s cooker and steal an entire tray of leftover barbecue. He must be thirsty too, because he ganks a cooler full of sweet tea in the process.

If you are reading this column now and thinking, “Ha, that was totally me,” keep laughing homeboy: someday I will find you and exact my revenge, and I promise it will involve a pig cooker, propane and sweet tea.

In retrospect I find it kind of funny that after everything — a cooler of beer, a beautiful football victory and the usual reaming of students by administrators, Event One staff and police officers — my only response was, “Who does that?”

I should have been mad at the police: if they had sent some of their officers to patrol the tailgate lot instead of oppress students and their parents at the football game, maybe I’d still have my pig.

I should have been ecstatic with our victory: I haven’t seen that kind of a quarterback performance at State since Philip Rivers left.

I should have felt bad for all those poor students that got ripped off by my imaginary administrators sitting in their dark, smoky room in the Vaughn Towers.

Instead, all I could do was hang my head in dejection.

“Man, I could really go for some pig right about now,” I thought sadly.

“Who steals barbecue?”

Don’t e-mail Kenneth at [email protected]. Instead, e-mail Lee Fowler, Chancellor Oblinger or Chief Younce and tell them that you’re sick of getting screwed at football games.