A year ago when I started attending Loyola, I came to a realization: college has a funny way of making football fans out of people who’d never really come near a sport in their entire lives. I came here with a couple of people from my high school — think the artsy kinds of kids who got picked last for P.E. because they’d hide on the other side of campus instead of going to class. We walked around for 18 years of our lives, completely oblivious to when and where the Super Bowl happened.

I should mention that this happened despite growing up in Texas, where football is basically life. You know that show “Friday Night Lights”? That’s us — all of it.

A month into college, my friends now have football schedules saved on their computers and tacked to their walls. I get invited over to “watch the game.” This confused me. I knew that college had mysterious powers, but what mysterious power was this at work? And would these powers consume me?

I admit that it has, at least a little bit. A few years ago, you couldn’t have paid me to come near sports that weren’t the Olympics (and by “Olympics” I mean gymnastics and figure skating — maybe a little bit of curling, if I felt like I needed a good laugh). A few Sundays ago, I found myself voluntarily searching out the game. Hooked is an overstatement at this point. I’m…a fan.

Or maybe I’m addicted and I have a problem. I wouldn’t know.

Maybe I give college a little too much credit. Maybe it’s New Orleans. Maybe it’s the fact that the Saints have become a story for the ages. They made a city come alive and a significant portion of the country want to stand up and applaud. Everyone loves a Cinderella story, especially when it happens in real life.

Even that doesn’t explain how this year and the last year, the closeted Texans and Giants and Broncos fans have crawled out of the crevices of Loyola, sporting Facebook statuses as colorful as the jerseys themselves. Maybe it’s the fact that we find a link back home — wherever that may be — from so far away. Maybe it’s our raging hormones that make us so eager to tie our emotions to a bunch of helmeted guys throwing themselves at each other to move a ball across a field. I don’t know. I do know that excited people make me excited and that I’ve come to love watching games for that reason.

Whatever the reason may be, happy Super Bowl XLVI, everybody.

Kylee McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]