My longtime boyfriend, who will be happy to see I’m going to call him Big Cocky, has been harassing me all week with nightmare scenarios about this game. Clemson’s looking ahead to the ACC Championship, he predicted. Their minds are on Tampa, not Columbia. They’re thinking about a rematch with Georgia Tech. And the most chilling statement of all: a mediocre SEC team, which he readily admits his Gamecocks are, can beat a top-shelf ACC team.

I have to admit I’ve lost a little sleep over that last one.

OK, I’m looking forward to Tampa, mostly because I want to go but I’m so broke right now I couldn’t buy a bag of peanuts and a souvenir Coke at a football game, let alone a championship ticket. But there’s a level of fun to rivalry week that doesn’t accompany any other game. The championship game isn’t going to be about fun so much as it’s going to be about respect. But rivalry week – well, that’s like Halloween for football fans. You get to let your inner smartass come out to trash-talk the opposition.

Is it like this at other schools? I wonder – do Auburn and Alabama fans have this sort of good-natured-among-friends-but-potentially-bloody-among-strangers relationship? I feel fairly certain Georgia and Georgia Tech have a higher level of animosity than Clemson and Carolina do, mostly because the Dawgs are such frickin’ swaggering loudmouthed bullies. Who are going to get their clocks cleaned this year, by the way, and whatever I may think of Tech and the upcoming championship game, I will smile every time they stuff the ball back down Georgia’s throat. The only way I could hate Georgia more is if we played them every year.

But I digress.

I have a history with this game, because every Clemson or Carolina fan does. I was in the stands in 2000, freezing my ass off as the sun went down, to see Rod Gardner make The Second Catch and position us to win the game; I was there four years later for The Brawl, when my best friend and I stood nervously in the stands while the fight spanned the visitors’ sidelines, half expecting the ugliness to migrate up from the field.

I was there in 1984 for the Black Magic season, our first defeat in the famous Orange Pants. I was a kid, thoroughly dismayed, and as my dad and I left Death Valley, some blowhard in his 40s, who I bet I could pick out of a lineup even 25 years later, came running through the crowd, going up to every other Clemson fan like a sugar-addled kid and crowing, “We beat ‘em in the Orange! We beat ‘em in the Orange!” My dad, normally mild-mannered, clearly didn’t think much of this but refused to take the bait. He patted me on the shoulder, leaned down, and said, “You know what? Someone’s going to kick his ass.” Not ten steps later, we heard the ass-kicking begin, although Dad refused to let me stay and watch.

I think it’s mellowed a bit since then, although I’m probably biased, coming from a mixed relationship. I know a Carolina fan who cringes whenever the 63-17 game is mentioned, and after the 2006 “wide left” game (not to mention the Florida State game earlier this year), I sometimes cover my eyes when a field goal is kicked.

I want C.J. Spiller to have a great game that helps him toward the Heisman.

I want Jacoby Ford to have a great game that gets him picked in the first round of the draft.

I want Deandre McDaniel to have four interceptions, and I have faith that Stephen Garcia will help him do it.

And I want every damn Clemson fan in the stands to close out the game yelling “ACC! ACC! ACC!”

Is that so much to ask?

(On a more serious note: R.I.P., UGA VII. I may hate the team but I never hate a mascot. I bet you were a good dog.)

And speaking of arrogance, let’s talk about Charlie Weis, because he’s not going to be there for me to kick around much longer.

It’s timely, since in two nights I’ve watched two teams I despise – the damned Notre Dame Fighting Irish (the only time I consider “fighting Irish” to be a racial slur is when my ethnicity gets tangled up with this team) and the New England Patriots.

The common note between these two teams is, of course, Charlie Weis, who, if you ask him, would say he deserved the head coaching job because he said so. Normally I’d have a little outrage set aside for anyone who mocked Weis for his unfortunate appearance, but he so richly deserves it that I call him Fat Bastard. I bet his players do, too.

Weis showed up a few years ago when Notre Dame ditched Tyrone Willingham for having a losing season while black, never having given him time to get his own team in place. Weis inherited Willingham’s team and beat their schedule full of cream puffs with it, only to get flattened in the Sugar Bowl by LSU, which was one of the most viscerally satisfying games I’ve ever watched. It happens every year: Notre Dame goes over .500 with their Krispy Kreme schedule and steals a BCS berth from some more deserving team, then gets beat like a rented mule. For that LSU game, I made popcorn. It was beautiful. Brady Quinn pouted on the sideline, practicing for the even more sullen pout he’d wear when no one wanted him in the NFL draft the next spring, and Weis lumbered along the sidelines like an out-of-shape parent living his football dreams through his kids. Unsuccessfully.

It didn’t get better for Weis, although it did for me. I’ll almost miss the arrogant prick when he’s gone, just because Notre Dame might start winning again. I love watching them lose, even to other overrated teams I hate, like Southern Cal. The College Gameday crew feature him every Saturday morning as regularly as a Scooby Doo villain, pouting and slouching at his press conference, smirking like George W. Bush when asked why he wasn’t winning. He looked like the second-string department store Santa, the one who scares all the little kids.

A little humility might’ve gone a long way with Weis. Or maybe it didn’t matter – Notre Dame has the same damned arrogance he does, thinking a bad movie with Ronald Reagan and a folk-art ripoff mosaic of Jesus somehow imbue them with moral superiority. And the talking heads are more than willing to play along, reminiscing weekly about their double handful of Heisman Trophy winners and their “storied tradition” of winning, which means, I suppose, they’ve been playing the bottom bitch of every conference for farther back than I can be bothered to investigate. Clemson would have a storied tradition, too, if we looked around the country at all the available teams and chose perennial losers like Washington State and Navy. If they signed up to play TCU and Alabama, I might have more use for them… but it’s never going to happen. They’re used to their stacked deck.

So it was a beautiful thing to watch Weis sulk on the sidelines like a troll forced to abandon his bridge, and just as satisfying to see Jimmy Clausen, an arrogant little prick who hired a white Hummer limousine to deliver his mediocre ass to the press on national signing day, get pasted by Pitt’s so-so defense. I’ll give Notre Dame this much: they’re such egomaniacs it seems their opponents hit them harder and throw them farther just because they can. Pitt didn’t really need to bring their A game, although they’re overrated too, but they smacked Clausen and his buddies around as if they were actually coached to hit hard. It made me wish Clausen had, through some scheduling error, met an SEC defense at some point.

It was fun. And it was just as much fun, last night, to watch Peyton Manning and company get pissed off in the 4^th quarter, trailing the supremely confident Patriots all the way through, and jam the ball down the defense’s throat in the last two minutes of the game, closing out the drive with a short, sweet pass to the end zone and a tie-breaking extra point. (We Clemson fans are, at the moment, watching a successful kicking game with a mixture of envy and rage.) Tom Brady pouted. Randy Moss glowered. And Bill Belichick looked like my cat when I took a mouse away from him, sullen and disbelieving. It made for a good football weekend, all the way around.

It’s great when the good guys win, and sometimes it’s just as great when the bad guys lose.

Some teams are always dangerous, no matter how wretched a year they’re having. While you can (usually) discount Duke, there’s so much volatility in the ACC right now that you can’t look past anyone else. NC State and Wake Forest have become black eyes waiting to happen, while Maryland lives to embarrass us every year or so.

The upshot? After going through all my nervous game-day rituals, taking off all my lucky jewelry in a panic in the 2nd quarter because it occurred to me that it might only be lucky when I’m watching the game somewhere other than home, throwing pillows and an empty amazon.com box at the door (I can’t afford to break another phone), howling myself hoarse at the late hits the officials didn’t call, and then bouncing off the walls during the 4th quarter when we put the game away, I got about 3 hours of sleep Saturday night, slept most of the day Sunday, and have evidently screwed my circadian rhythms more efficiently than a sleep deprivation experiment. I’m just getting back to normal today.

The big takeaway from Saturday, other than a stress-induced migraine that came on in the 4th quarter, was heart. I’d spent the entire day watching football, and amid the upsets — which were like a weird nationwide weather pattern, hovering over half the football stadiums last weekend — only twice did I see a team suck it up and save the day. The first time was (damn it) during the Alabama-LSU game, when Mark Ingram and Julio Jones singlehandedly rammed a win through the defense of my second-favorite team; and the second was the Clemson comeback, when C.J. Spiller and Andre Ellington squared their shoulders and refused to let the game go.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch when a player decides to carry his entire team to victory. It’s not that they decided to be heroes: it’s that they by-God wouldn’t stand there and accept defeat. Spiller was clearly exhausted, but ran in one more touchdown and got us most of the way to another; Ellington, a freshman, caught this spirit and took one more trip to the end zone himself. It reminded me of the 2006 Wake Forest game, when Gaines Adams took the ball from a shocked kicking unit, scored a touchdown, and woke his team up again; and the 2005 USC game, when James Davis punched in the Tigers’ only touchdown against a stubborn Gamecock defense.

I love a hero, and Saturday night I got to watch two of them.

There’s something more that needs to be said about Florida State: those fans pissing and moaning against Bobby Bowden ought to know they can be replaced and he can’t. There will always be more fans to go around, but how many coaches are out there with multiple national championships and 34 winning seasons? Let the whiners go, damn it. More asses in seats — and I mean that — aren’t so necessary that a good coach needs to go in order to shut them up. And something else: those people aren’t really fans. If you don’t appreciate what Bobby Bowden has done for that program, and for college football in general, you’re not only not an FSU fan, you’re not much of a football fan. Go watch the Big Ten from some sports bar. It’s what you deserve.

I don’t bash coaches. Well, I don’t bash Clemson coaches, which sets me apart from about 95% of Tiger fans right away. I will take a few swings at some other deserving coaches, though – like Charlie Weis, with his enormous, bloated ego, or “Pantene Pete” Carroll, who’s clearly missed his calling as a lobbyist, if not a model. But I like Dabo. I liked Tommy Bowden, and by the way, I like his daddy, too. I like most coaches better than I like most fans — you’ve been warned.

I’m also not into rumormongering. I don’t see any need to report something the neighbor’s cousin’s mailman’s daughter’s boyfriend’s brother’s roommate thinks he overheard when walking past Death Valley during a practice. I’ve endured more than enough bullshit rumors about Clemson football in my life, and have about as much use for them as I do for the crap people make up online about the President’s “Kenyan birth certificate.”

Tiger football is my true love, but there are other teams and players to appreciate, just as there are teams and players that will (continue to) embarrass themselves.  I like West Virginia and LSU; I loathe Notre Dame and Ohio State. And at least once a year I’ll probably praise Peyton Manning to the skies, as well as wonder when Michael Vick will be devoured by wild dogs.

I grew up going to Death Valley every home game, taking home souvenir cups (most of which are still in my kitchen cupboard), screaming myself hoarse, and walking around on Monday with a tigerpaw-shaped pale spot on my otherwise sunburned face. (By the way, you can’t hide a tigerpaw with makeup.)

I scream at the radio and throw things at the television. I’ve broken one portable phone and two remote controls since 2005 while watching games. I curse creatively at Virginia Tech and Boston College and fork the sign of the evil eye when the Miami Hurricanes or Georgia Bulldogs are mentioned.

I have gameday rituals: the right t-shirt, the lucky jewelry, orange lipstick, orange lingerie — which, by the way, is not easy to find. If we’re losing, I’ve chased my Gamecock-loyal boyfriend out of the room; if we’re winning, I find myself frozen on the sofa, unable to move for fear I’ll shift the balance of the cosmos and wreck things for the team. (This may have caused us to lose the recent Georgia Tech game. I’m sorry.)

Finally, I love my Tigers. I feel lucky to have actually watched some of Clemson’s players: years from now I’ll still smile when I think about having watched C.J. Spiller and Jacoby Ford and James Davis from only a few yards away, halfway up the stands. I think fondly of Homer Jordan and the Fridge and my childhood hero, Perry Tuttle. I would probably touch my forehead to the ground in the presence of Coach Danny Ford. I remember Rod Gardner’s catch, the 27-10 FSU victory, the 63-17 USC massacre. I will treasure the recent Miami defeat forever, and every New Year’s Day I watch the 1982 Orange Bowl.

I love sports. I love football. I love Clemson. And all three are worth writing about.