Saturday morning came, and it was game day.

Under sunny skies and bundled up against the perfect fall-football-chilly breezes, the tailgaters emerged, and from their SUVs and Winnebagos wafted the smell of burgers grilling, the tunes of rock music blaring, and the noises from the vast sea of blue and white fans coloring the parking lots and fields surrounding the stadium and across State College.

I, like most of you who had highly anticipated this particular game all weekend, woke up with a headache, three Advil and ESPN.

An evening game meant that the whole day lay ahead to pre-game with your crew and come up with catchy heckles to throw at Michigan fans later.

I would have loved to head right to a tailgate and worship the religion of football right alongside my fellow Penn Staters.

But the arrival of the PSU vs. Michigan showdown for me meant that I had to go to work. This is my second year working at Beaver Stadium as a ticket attendant. Basically, what I do is I scan tickets at the gate, and if you've got a General Admission ticket, you're going through Gate B, and there's a good chance I'll be scanning yours.

This type of work I can hardly complain about. The job pays well, I see parts of the games for free, and best of all, I get to interact with all sorts of Penn State fans under multiple states of drunkenness.

Besides scanning tickets, my job description also includes giving out high fives and rounding off the "Penn State!" of the "We are!" cheer, and dealing with flirtatious older alumni who ask me to join them in their seats. Some alumni interpret my position as a somewhat security personnel and request a strip search (at which point I direct them toward the burly state troopers lined up behind me).

Over time I've developed pretty good persuasion skills, which come in handy when it comes to asking men to (gasp!) dispose of their beers, or when convincing a completely annihilated alumnus that $100 and his driver's license do not constitute a football ticket. Police officers work in conjunction with admissions people to prevent chaos and regulate the thousands of people who will stampede through the gate in a two-hour span of time.

You'd think that a combination of 100,000 blue-and-white-blooded fanatics under the influence would ensure a degree of violent pandemonium. But I've only seen the police use necessary brute force on a few occasions (and then again, not-so-necessary pepper spray bullying on students). Saturday night, though, a record three people were led off in handcuffs out of the stadium ... half an hour before the gates even opened. It was an alcoholic anomaly. When the Michigan game was over, I sat by the gate waiting for the stadium to empty and watching State devotees trudge home to sleep, eat or drown their sorrows, and then finally went home and did the same.

The five Michigan boys staying at my apartment this weekend were gracious winners, and the evening drew to a close without riots, beatings or suicide attempts. I worked at the other white-out night game last year, Ohio State, and though the outcome of that game was more favorable to our NCAA cause, the fans were still diehard, and maintaining their conviction that no matter what our record shows, Penn State is and will always be number one.

Which is true.

Because next weekend the tailgaters will reemerge, the grills and Winnebagos and fans will be fired up, and people will stampede through Gate B once again to cheer on the Nittany Lions.

So as stadium personnel, I should be asking you to be cordial to our visiting guests and a little less raucous when stampeding through the gate, and to try and take it easy on the sauce.

But I won't (and maybe it's because I'm from Philly) because I have to admit that I love the passion, the devotion and the loud-and-proud obnoxiousness of Penn State fans. Ohio State players admitted that it was the student section earthquake that threw them off their game. A loss here and there shouldn't throw us off ours.

We are, as ESPN proclaimed, the best student section in the country, and we better keep acting like it. And as far as I've seen, our alumni still do. I'm working next weekend, so I better see you at Homecoming.