Becky’s and my pilgrimage to Hinkle Fieldhouse for yesterday’s BracketBusters matchup between Butler and Southern Illinois was an adventure from the start. It was snowing when we left South Bend around 10:00 AM — nothing compared to the recent blizzard or the lake-effect near-whiteouts, but enough to make the roads slick — and the light snowfall continued all the way to Indianapolis, making our trek down Route 31 decidedly more interesting. Becky was behind the wheel, and experienced winter driver though she is, she definitely found the trip more stressful than usual.

The real drama began, though, when we got to the area near Hinkle around 3:00 PM, an hour before game time. We waited for maybe 10 minutes in a long line of cars heading toward the fieldhouse parking lot, only to be told by a uniformed officer that the lot was reserved for prepaid patrons, and that we could park “anywhere on campus or in the neighborhood.” Easier said than done, as it turned out.

Indy was hit significantly harder than South Bend by the recent blizzard, and the snow crews down there have a significantly harder time dealing with it, as they aren’t accustomed to that sort of snowfall. Becky’s aunt and uncle, longtime Indy residents with whom we stayed last night, called it a once-in-25-years event. And with little or no melting since the blizzard hit, and grossly inadequate plowing, many streets and parking lots are still in very rough shape. As a result, the parking situation in the neighborhood around Hinkle was quite forbidding. Becky’s front-wheel-drive Camry isn’t exactly equipped to trudge through snow banks along the edge of local side streets, so we decided to head into campus searching for a spot. Of course, we were joined in this endeavour by a few hundred of our closest friends; hosting the marquee game of a made-for-TV national sports extravaganza is a bit problematic when much of the street parking on which your stadium normally depends is rendered off-limits by a blizzard.

After searching in vain for maybe 20 minutes, Becky — getting a little desperate as game time creeped closer — decided to take a crack at pulling into an unplowed spot in a student parking lot. Bad idea. About a third of the way into the spot, the car stopped moving and the wheels started spinning. She put the car into reverse and tried to back out. More spinning. “You’re going to have to get out and push,” she told me. Now, dear readers, you may not be aware of this, but my physical build is not exactly what most people would describe as “buff.” :) Nevertheless, I did my best to push the car backwards as Becky kicked it in reverse and hit the gas. But the wheels just kept spinning.

Enter two bubbly college-age girls who had been looking for a spot in the same lot, bounding out of their car and declaring, “Do you need help? We have shovels!” And indeed, each girl had a snow shovel in hand. One of them asked us, “Do you guys get snow like this in Illinois?” Only later did I fully grasp the implications of this question: these were Butler students who thought we were SIU fans, presumably having driven in from Carbondale, rather than relatively neutral observers from South Bend. And yet they were helping us out anyway. It may be a dog-eat-dog world, but it seems Bulldogs can play nice with Salukis.

Anyway, we gratefully accepted their offer of help and tried to dig out the tires. But still no luck. No matter how much we dug and then pushed, the car wouldn’t budge. Finally, a large gentleman in a Colts jersey showed up, and with the added force of his help pushing the car, we were able to get the darn thing out of the deep snow and back to the plowed surface where it had traction again. We thanked them profusely for their help, and as they walked away, I asked (somewhat stupidly), “Hey, are you guys for Butler or Southern Illinois?” They replied enthuastically and in unison, “Butler!!” To which I responded, “Hey, well, I think we have to root for Butler now.”

It took a while, but we finally found a spot — not on campus after all, but in the neighborhood, about 10 blocks from the fieldhouse — and started trudging through the snow toward our destination. On our way there, we passed another car being pushed out of the snow by a helpful group of a half-dozen or so apparent strangers. Also en route, we followed a large group of fellow street parkers up a well-trodden path directly over the top of a large snowbank on the edge of the parking lot.

So when SI’s Luke Winn describes Hinkle on Saturday as a “basketball oasis in the middle of a Midwestern blizzard” and ESPN’s Kyle Whelliston says “10,827 fans braved an Indianapolis snowstorm” to watch the game, they’re not lying… though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we braved the lingering aftereffects of a blizzard that came and went over a week ago, worsened by the minor inconvenience of ongoing light snowfall.

Anyway, we finally arrived at Hinkle Fieldhouse at around 3:40 PM…

…and that’s where this post stops. I’ll talk about the actual experience of attending the game in “Part II.”