Final victory fills fans with pride, bowl plans

CORVALLIS — Unbeaten.

Historic.

!!!!!

Pinch-him-he-must-be-dreaming unreal.

This is not your father’s Oregon football team. This is not even your older brother’s Oregon football team from the Joey Harrington era less than a decade ago.

This is your Oregon football team, Andrew Martz, a 21st century college football juggernaut that just stifled a stubborn Oregon State team Saturday in the 114th edition of the Civil War to finish the regular season 12-0.

So what are you going to do now?

“Gotta buy my plane tickets!” said Martz, a University of Oregon senior from Lake Oswego. “National championship — let’s go!”

Martz was in the middle of the field in Reser Stadium, with his good friend and fellow senior Richie Bowen celebrating the surreal with hundreds of other jubilant UO fans after the 37-20 win over the Beavers put the top-ranked Ducks in the BCS National Championship game pending today’s formal announcement.

“I think it’s awesome,” Bowen said. “Especially since it’s our senior year.”

“Best thing that could happen!” Martz screamed above the din of ecstatic Duck fans.

A few thousand UO fans, most of them packed into the southeast corner of the stadium, came to witness what no other Oregon football team had ever done: finish the regular season with a perfect record (unless you count the 4-0 UO team of 1895) and have the chance to play for a national title.

Of course, like many games this season, Duck fans had to sweat out the first half as the Beavers in their throwback “Giant Killer” uniforms circa 1967, and their raucous orange-clad faithful gave the UO all they wanted and more.

But as the Ducks took command in the second half, as they have done all season long, and the final seconds ticked off the clock, it was pandemonium in that southeast corner as the entire Oregon team, clad in its latest Nike fashion statement of steel-gray-and-white uniforms, ran toward their fans to celebrate a dream come true.

“B-C-S! B-C-S! B-C-S!” fans shouted, many of them having leapt over the first-row wall and joined the players, who raised their helmets to acknowledge their fans, in a frenzied swirl of ecstasy. Players danced with the Duck mascot who soon found himself crowd surfing just as he did after last year’s Civil War at Autzen Stadium that sent the UO to the Rose Bowl. This time, however, the Duck was not clutching a bouquet of Roses because the “Granddaddy of ’em all” is now an afterthought in this greatest of Oregon football seasons.

In fact, OSU fans wanted nothing more than to see the Beavers pull off what would have been the biggest upset in the Civil War’s 114-game history, and thus knock the Ducks into the Rose Bowl.

“Congratulations on your Rose Bowl bid, man,” an OSU fan said to a green-clad Duck fan walking along SW Western Boulevard outside the stadium about a half-hour before kickoff.

Orange-and-black signs (“I smell Roses” … “Start smellin’ ”) at ESPN College GameDay’s early morning appearance on campus also suggested that if Beaver fans had anything to say about it, the Ducks would have to settle for the Rose Bowl.

Duck fans countered that with their own signs: “No Rose Bowl. We want the ‘Natty,’ ” a reference to the “national” championship game in Glendale, Ariz., a term apparently coined by UO cornerback Cliff Harris earlier in the week.

Hundreds if not thousands of UO fans, not wanting to miss out on getting down to Glendale next month, took the risk and booked plane flights in recent weeks. And now they’re glad they did.

“Oh, yeah,” said Craig Siler of Salem, who was standing on Reser’s turf after the game with his wife, Cindy, watching UO fans dance and celebrate and jump in the air at the mobile ABC-TV camera that was capturing it all from above. The Silers bought their flights to Arizona a month ago. Now they just need to find tickets to the title game that are more than $300 at face value, and will garner much more than that from those willing to pay scalpers.

“We’ll cough up the bucks,” Craig Siler said. “It doesn’t matter. Once in a lifetime. The Rose Bowl (last year) was a blast. I can only imagine how much fun the BCS is going to be.”

The Silers had a look of disbelief in their eyes as they stood on the sidelines of Reser and took in the celebration.

“I just told her, it’s a long way from the ‘Toilet Bowl’ to this,” said Craig Siler, who grew up in Grants Pass and attended the UO in the 1970s before coming back to earn his degree in 1989. He was, of course, referring to the infamous Civil War game of 1983 at Autzen Stadium, which ended in a 0-0 tie and is known as the epitome of ineptitude back when both schools rarely had winning records in football, let alone competed to be among the nation’s best.

But this?

“This is wonderful,” said Cindy Siler, who grew up a Duck fan in Tillamook. The Silers’ son, J.D., graduated from the UO last spring and is now a graduate student at the University of Denver. He’ll meet them in Glendale for the biggest game in UO history, his parents said.

Three Portland friends, John Friess, John Hayden and Paul Anthony, all UO graduates in the 1990s, said they were never worried Saturday that the Beavers would spoil the dream.

“No way,” said Hayden, a 1996 UO graduate standing in the first row of Section 11 on the south side of Reser. “Every game has been like this. It’s all about the second half.”

With the Ducks up 30-13 on Kenjon Barner’s 23-yard touchdown early in the fourth quarter, Anthony, a 1999 UO graduate — his hair painted green and his face painted green-and-yellow like that of his buddies — screamed out: “National championship — here we come!”

Friess said he paid more than $1,200 for four front-row Civil War tickets on Stubhub.com, the ticket-reseller website. But it was worth it to experience what he said was one of the greatest moments of his life.

“I met my wife at the UO,” Friess said with a straight face. “That’s now the second greatest moment of my life. How’s that for a quote?”

He was joking. We think.