After waiting in line for two-and-a-half weeks to get that perfect seat to watch your beloved Badgers take on the Buckeyes of Ohio State you may be wondering, “What in the hell was I thinking?”

This wonderment may, in fact, accompany your frostbitten fingers and that failing grade you received on your first midterm, but, hey, at least you got to see the game, right? Assuming you actually make it to the game, that is.

In what will undoubtedly be the biggest all-campus pre-party in recent memory, the Saturday of Oct. 11, 2003 will go down in history beside Halloween ’02 and the Mifflin block parties of yesteryear. It will be a day of festive drinking and sporadic yet euphoric moments of food consumption. By the time UW takes on OSU, the only good your seating position will provide is as a conversation starter with that cute girl across the room.

Does the fact that your ticket is in section O, row 5 really show your dedication to the Cardinal and White when you’re passed out on Regent Street by 7 p.m.? It’s not the ticket, or the waiting in line that shows your pride for the Badgers; it’s how you perform at the game that truly counts.

This past weekend those individuals who waited for more than a week to redeem their hockey vouchers in the brisk fall weather received redemption Sunday morning. Herds of fans walked away from the Kohl Center and used the rest of their weekend to gloat to friends studying in the library. Ah yes, glass seats, doesn’t get much better. Let me be the first to welcome you to the Promised Land. If you’re lucky you may even have seats that aren’t a direct head-on view, and you can watch the games in relative obscurity for a full season.

With the hockey fans picking up their sleeping bags and drudging off the Kohl Center sidewalks leaving their “soda cans” and other remnants behind, we are left to see pure dedication. We are left staring in wonderment at those individuals waiting in line for tickets to a football game almost two weeks away.

I didn’t even want to leave my bed this morning, let alone go outside, and there they were, sure as the sun rising, the “super fans,” if I may. I don’t doubt their dedication to the team; it’s their sanity I question. Facing 20-mile-an-hour winds, frost advisories, bitterly cold rain and, of course, those pesky Madison Police Officers, these fans make me question some things.

In a society that scorns athletes for leaving college early and merely using it as a gateway to the professional level, we allow students at a prestigious university to disregard their health and their classes in the pursuit of a ticket location. Shouldn’t the university step in and come up with an alternative plan to allow students to show their support and to attend classes at the same time?

Football fans may laugh at the prospect of waiting in line for eight hours to see a Jessica Simpson concert, but when it comes time to risk bodily harm for a seat designation there is not an ounce of reason in their bodies. They complete their objective with variable efficiency but pure stupidity.

For these reasons, I propose a new system of ticket distribution. It’s a basic concept that has been used at headlining concerts for years. Let the students stand in line if they’d like for the opportunity to get a lottery ticket with a number on it. These numbers would then be called in random order, and seats would be distributed accordingly.

For those of you thinking this would ruin the tradition of sitting in sections O or P you are mistaken. Each section will be an even distribution of crazed fans ready to cheer the Badgers on to victory. Even section L will become a raucous good time. If there is going to be a provision added for a pure upperclassman section, let it be just that. It can’t be a bunch of freshman that merely went to high school with a junior buddy, and so they got the hook-up. Order is the key to success.

Now we arrive at the prospect that, interspersed throughout those people waiting for Ohio State tickets, are individuals waiting to redeem season basketball tickets. Anyone who waits for a month to see if the Badgers can win a third-straight Big Ten title shouldn’t have to pay tuition. Of course, I can’t imagine how they would be smart enough to get into this school to need to pay tuition in the first place.

If you want to show dedication, show up at the airport when the team returns from Penn State, wait outside of the buses to congratulate them, cheer as loud as possible at the games, but do you really need to sit outside for days on end?

For those of you who answer with a resounding “yes,” I give you two points of advice: bundle up, and don’t fall asleep, because failure to do either could mean you’ll have to leave before your time.