This year’s road to our annual family Pittsburgh home game journey started back over the summer months. Our son D-man was starting his senior year of high school and his final year on the varsity football team for our hometown. As all football parents know, that means an all-encompassing schedule of practices, games, fundraisers, and all the other exciting things that come with having a varsity football player in the family.
To rewind a bit, our home game of choice usually falls on or around the Veterans Day weekend, which luckily follows the end of the school’s football schedule (sans playoffs) leaving us free to set out for our trip. This year, a new coach brought new life to our team and playoff hopes were alive from day one. As the wins stacked up for the team, it looked as though our family Pittsburgh trip was going to need to be either rescheduled, or cancelled for this year, as we would be cheering on the sideline for D.
I’m a planner, so tickets are usually my department, and I try to have us set up a month or so in advance. This year, it was going to come down to the wire with playoffs, so tickets were on hold until we knew for sure. Well… less than a week before our scheduled weekend our home season came to an end and BWG and I were scrambling for tickets… not just any tickets… but fantastic seats, to congratulate D-man on his own awesome season.
My fallback plan is always our corporate seats at Acrisure but since the Packers game was in such demand, even our overflow seats outside the corporate box were already scooped up. The scramble was on… and we eventually settled on seats on the river side, pricey but, hey… it is the Steelers.
Our norm is to try to get to the field as early as possible so that we get to see the player warmups on the field and talk about all the things that “civilian football coaches” talk about before a game. It is fun to watch BWG, LMT (not so “Little Miss Tailgate” now) and D-man go through the gameplan as if Mike Tomlin was relying on their feedback for the game.
Our seats were PERFECT for this. We were right there for some of the best plays of the game and had an up-close of that final play that had us all sitting on the edge of our seat.
Sometimes, even though the road is winding…things just work out the way they were meant to.
Another successful Pittsburgh trip on our scorecard!