Picture this. You haven’t slept in days. You haven’t eaten anything that isn’t from Jolly Scholar since last Tuesday. You haven’t seen daylight in what feels like years. Your brain is overflowing with mathematical proofs and impending doom. All you want is to curl up in a ball and pretend thermodynamics doesn’t exist.

But … all of a sudden … just as you drag yourself toward class … an old woman with pom-poms leaps out from behind one of the columns in Tink and starts shaking them in your face. You look up. There it is: the CWRU Blue banner. The realization hits you. Not only is it midterms, it’s Homecoming.

You freeze. The CWRU fight song starts faintly echoing through the quad like a war cry. Alumni (no current students or tbh any recent alum) in blue face paint and foam fingers emerge from every corner, chanting “SPARTANS!” as if they’ve been summoned from the depths of a University Marketing and Communications casting call. You rub your eyes, wondering if this is a caffeine hallucination, but no, there’s President Kaler himself, waving from a golf cart like the Pope of rebranding. He’s smiling. He’s chanting. He’s throwing used jerseys again!

You duck, narrowly avoiding a grass-stained 2006 football jersey as it sails past your head (who knew Kaler had that kind of arm? I guess the office of DEI) Someone blasts a kazoo in your face and shouts “ARE YOU READY FOR THE GAME?” You want to say, “No, I’m not even ready for my midterm,” but it’s too late—you’ve been swept into a sea of blue jerseys and white hair before you can protest.

Now you’re in the parade. You’re somehow marching next to a group of alumni who look disturbingly energetic for people who witnessed the WRU-CIT merger firsthand. Someone in the marching band starts playing “Sweet Caroline,” and the crowd joins in—off-key, off-rhythm and entirely too proud.

Then, just when you think it can’t get worse, you catch a glimpse of a phone screen (size extra double bold font) reading 11:30 a.m. You realize you’re late for your midterm. Your flight-or-flight kicks kicks in, and you choose flight. The crowd chooses fight. You’re trapped in a human stampede of misplaced school spirit and unmedicated nostalgia.

You realize this is it. This is your villain origin story. You came to this school to be a doctor, but you’ll leave it as a legend—the ghost of Homecoming Week, forever haunting KSL, whispering the immortal words of The Observer: “The only thing you should be getting on your knees for is that curve.”