There’s an alternate universe where Oklahoma finishes last night’s comeback. I don’t know what that universe holds for Rodney Terry, but for Jeremiah Fears, I imagine it contains a lifetime of balloon-based promotions, each fueling further greatness than the one before. What does this mean for the latex industry, and for the clown industry, and for all who participate in balloon art? That’s for that universe to know. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly latex is.
Back in this universe, Texas held off the Sooners’ charge. Texas got its first SEC win. Oklahoma didn’t. Rodney Terry is still employed. Porter Moser still looks like he lives in imminent fear of life as a Qatari slave. And somehow, local media here in Austin is billing the near-disintegration of a 23-point lead as a watershed moment in two guys’ careers after those guys shot a very average 44% and turned the ball over seven times. Hook ‘em, baby. Now. Back to fighting an army of straw men over Quinn Ewers’s legacy.
The game was the game.
The balloon snake was something special.
As best as I can tell, what happened in Norman last night was that the Lloyd Noble Center handed out thunder sticks, those long straight balloons which are basically rally towels crossed with percussion. I think that was how all those balloons got into the building. This is just a guess, but it’s the best guess I’ve got.
However the balloons found their way into the crowd, sometime around halftime, OU students realized they could tie one end to another. Never underestimate the ingenuity of bored adolescents.
Here’s how it began:
Here’s what it looked like just before the under-8 timeout, when Oklahoma cut the Longhorn lead to five:
I have a guess at what you’re thinking, especially since I mentioned latex earlier. Yes, that looks like one gigantic used condom. That thing is droopy. This was not a visual spectacle in the way of cup snakes, those glorious glittering testaments to just how many beers we can all collectively drink in the early innings of a baseball game. But was it impressive? Hell yeah it was impressive! Those students formed a perimeter! They brought the balloon snake end-to-end! They penned the Longhorns in! The roar from the crowd when the balloon snake united, forming that perfect whole? You would have thought the ghost of Blake Griffin had just dunked on the ghost of Kevin Durant.
Sure. In this universe, the balloon snake will probably prove meaningless, or—worse—will turn into some contrived tradition foisted upon a 3–15 SEC team by Oklahoma’s athletic department marketers. But there’s another universe where Jordan Pope misses two more shots. I want a peek into that universe. In that universe, the balloon snake is the deadliest reptile on American soil.
