BOONE, N.C. – The monumental upset at No. 5 Michigan was only minutes old when, more than 400 miles away, Appalachian State senior David Rockensuess and a dozen or so other students did what delirious college football fans always do.
They headed for the school’s football stadium, climbed the fence, and tore down the goalpost.
Then it really got fun.
Dragging the trophy down the main street in town, their numbers grew. By the time they reached the chancellor’s house, a small army had joined in to help.
“There were hundreds of us,” Rockensuess said. “There may have been a thousand there at the end.”
The goalpost was still sitting in Chancellor Kenneth Peacock’s yard as Rockensuess talked outside a bar across from campus.
Drivers honked horns as they drove by, flags waved and students screamed, “It’s good to be a Mountaineer!”
Fans chanted “ASU, ASU” next to trees that were littered with toilet paper.
Drop the 13,000-plus who live in Boone, N.C., in the middle of Ann Arbor, Mich., and they would largely go unnoticed.
On Saturday, however, after Appalachian State’s 34-32 win over No. 5 Michigan, the state school, nestled in a sleepy college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, was the center of the college football universe.
Downtown, in between sips of beer from plastic cups, students debated the significance of perhaps the biggest upsets in college football history.
“This is my humble opinion: This is the biggest thing to happen to Boone,” said senior Zach Williams, who skipped out of work overseeing the tennis courts at a nearby country club to watch the second half.
Considering no Division I-AA had beaten a team ranked in The Associated Press poll from 1989-2006, and it’s unlikely that it had ever happened before, that opinion was sure to gain support.
“This the second biggest upset in sports,” said another student, conceding only the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s upset of the Soviet Union.
As students waited for the team to arrive back in town late Saturday, many felt Appalachian State’s win over Michigan, in front of more than 107,000 fans in Ann Arbor, is bigger than the consecutive I-AA national championships won by the Mountaineers the last two years.
Appalachian State has long dominated the Southern Conference and has won 15 straight games, longest in the nation.
Beating a Big Ten team that had national championship aspirations was something altogether different.
Per Frisk of Chapel Hill, N.C., knew Corey Lynch blocked a field goal attempt on the last play three seconds ahead of most of the rest of town.
“I tried to go watch it at the Library and I was sitting in this guy’s car in the parking lot,” Frisk said. “The radio was 3 seconds faster than the TV, so I heard the kick was blocked and I jumped up and started cheering.
“I realized no one else was cheering. Then 2 seconds later everyone started cheering. And then it blew up, man.”
Cassidy McCorkle, a graduate student from Atlanta, was one of several students not looking to end the party anytime soon as the sun set Saturday night.
“I go to the best college in the world,” McCorkle said.
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