The fat cat scalpers are sobbing, soaked from their factory-mint Penn State jerseys to their Abercrombie jeans in greasy tears.
This can't be the end, they cry in anguish. This can't be the first season without $200 Michigan tickets, without easy pickings from desperate left-outs, without the gold rush to eBay that came to characterize Penn State student ticket sales.
As the athletic department debuts the new student football ticket system - goodbye to paper stubs, hello to Id+ card swipes - scalpers everywhere mourn the end of an era. Figures from last week's ticket sale indicate that many have already bowed out from the football extortion racket to pursue profit elsewhere.
But the numbers show something else, something that's got the scalping underworld muttering and furtively looking to the hills. Sales show that The Greatest Student Section in The Nation, home to the White Out, "We Are" and the Nittany Lion, may have harbored more of these opportunists in its midst than any of us had expected.
Their secret is in the open. Call it the Green Out.
Greg Myford, associate athletic director, remembers the rush of 2008, a humdinger of Perfect Storm proportions. Junior tickets sold out in 90 seconds, and many of those who pre-registered logged onto their computers to find out there weren't any seats left.
Penn State was still operating under the old paper ticket system in 2008, easily transferable and difficult to track.
Next to that, this year was smooth sailing. While sales were fast and furious for the first fifteen minutes or so, they progressed at a comparatively languid pace throughout the afternoon, and every class except the freshmen still had unsold tickets left over at the end of the day.
Why? Myford directly attributes this to the suppression of scalpers. And when he says scalpers, let's not forget that he means students like you and me, different only in that they saw nothing in the sport but its potential for a quick buck.
"Part of the student body has been eliminated from the sale," he said. "Those students would come in right away, scoop up tickets as quickly as they could and post them online for sale. If you go online and go to eBay, compared to last year, it's not even close."
He's right. A search Monday for "Penn State student football tickets" on eBay yielded one result, a $1,249.99 offer for season seats. Of course, a look the same seller's "Items for Sale" shows that he or she seems to make a living by trading coupons for soft drinks online, so buyer beware.
The ticket sales give us a valuable opportunity to compare last year's sellers with this year's. All in all -- and he stressed that his numbers are just an estimate at this point -- Myford estimates 10 percent of ticket buyers in 2008 scalped their allotment. That comes out to about 2,200 people who made a killing and 2,200 who were left out of the sport they loved.
The good news is that everyone who pre-registered for a ticket and showed up for the sale this year got their place in the stands. The good news is that Penn State has another year to show off its great student section, as Paternoville Coordination Committee member Dan Saxton puts it.
"I think Penn State students are still as devoted and rambunctious about Penn State football as they were before," he said. "Even when we add all those scalpers, we were still considered the best student section in the nation."
The bad news? The difference in ticket sales has shown us an uglier side of the student section that was previously indistinct and abstract. It was easier to write off organized scalping as a small motley bunch when you didn't know that one in 10 of your friends were involved.
Scalpers begin to look a lot less like fat cats and a lot more like every other diehard fan you see walking around campus.
And until the athletic department conclusively crunches the numbers, we'll never really know how many of our fellow students were really just out for the money.
Andrew McGill is a senior majoring in journalism and is The Daily Collegian's Wednesday columnist. His e-mail address is arm5077@psu.edu.
