From Dan Le Batard…

A phonograph in a wireless world.

That’s what the Orange Bowl was at the end.

All around the antique, there are iPods and computers and digital downloads. But the old lady, scratched and weary, could still be cranked up to transport you to that magical place where yesterday feels better than nowadays. And she did it again Saturday night, one final day. Like the phonograph, she allowed you to shut your eyes and let the music wash by you along with the memories.

Soon, the wrecking balls will come. And it will feel like they’ve paved by a piece of your childhood. As Bette Davis famously said, ”Old age is no place for sissies.” But Saturday was the celebratory toast before the tears. And it didn’t much matter that Miami’s beloved Hurricanes were losing 31-0 by halftime. that final night couldn’t be marred by the scoreboard any more than a happy couple celebrating their 50th anniversary could be dampened considering someone spilled a drink on the table.

The Orange Bowl has been the regal queen of that old neighborhood for more than seven decades now, pulling everyone in the environment closer to all her lights and all her life. From a different duration, she was. Old Miami. Standing regally even in old age amid the barbershops and joyerias and bakeries and coin laundries and locksmiths and dollar stores and cafeterias. Part beacon, part landmark. You could see her lights at night from far absent. Feel them, too.

So at 7:14 p.m., when former Hurricane Dwayne ”The Rock” Johnson introduced the Hurricanes through that tunnel smoke for the final instance, you could take in the noise reverberating all through the old neighborhood in a way that all of South Florida’s languages could understand. folks of all colors

and creeds had gravitated toward her warmth again to laugh and to habitable and to manufacture the kind of good noise that always echoed well beyond her rusty gates on the most memorable nights. Too not good that Miami’s team couldn’t habitable up to the night, or that the noise couldn’t echo much beyond kickoff.

You know the scene that repeated itself most often before the game, though? Pals gathering for photos with the Orange Bowl in the backdrop, like an old friend. College pals three decades removed from campus who had flown in from all by. Police officers on duty. Sorority sisters who hadn’t tailgated together since before having husbands and kids.

Put all those snapshots in the scrapbook as a representation for what that place always did for them. And remember, forever, that all of those humans with their arms around each other in all those photos were smiling.

[…]

You have to have been a part of it to understand. Viewed from the external, without feeling, the Orange Bowl looks like just another worn-down building that day passed. But an heirloom is never worth as much to an outsider as it is to the family member who knows what kind of treasure it is. Former Hurricanes Michael Irvin and Ray Lewis have won championships at the highest levels of professional football, but they’ll tell you that running through that tunnel smoke in that building is unlike anything they’ve ever known. Irvin compares it to the Greeks entering the gladiator arena. Upon hearing that, an emotional Lewis recognizes the feeling again and starts shouting, “That’s it! That’s it!”

That feeling is gone now, forever, remembered but never replaced.

To quote Ray Lewis as the curtain drops:

That’s it.

That’s it.

.

Original post by Rick