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Last month during Brown’s second annual night game, several players left the stadium and immediately noticed something was off: the moon was out. “I knew there were times when the moon would be out during the day,” said quarterback Buddy “Mastodon” Riggins ’12. “But then I noticed the rest of the sky was all dark and figured it must be raining.” However, rain was absent from the forecast and Riggins tried to put the pieces together of what just happened. “6 p.m. call. Coach brought us dinner. Signs promoting a ‘Night Game’. Giant rental vans filled with lights. I wasn’t seeing the connection. No one was.”
“It was scary. I was scared,” said Vince “Stegosaurus” Rebar ’13. “I asked coach where he thought it came from, and he just said ‘there are a lot of things we aren’t supposed to understand, and light is one of them.’”
Players attempted several times to destroy the source of the light but found little success, and many came away from the assault with third degree burns. “There’s a relationship between heat and light,” said Rebar, encountering vehement vocal opposition from his teammates.
In an expensive and unprompted but highly attended press conference, Coach Phil Estes responded to the confusion. “We’re taking a few steps to address this,” Estes said, pointing to a man in a labcoat. “We’ll be hiring several people dressed like this to head the ‘Committee on Electricity and Visibility’, where we can hopefully put an end to rumors of a ‘second sun’ or that our stadium is on fire.”
The confusion comes in the wake of vocal protests from East Side residents living near Brown Stadium, who have sent several dozen letters to the University complaining that the artificial lights have caused many Brown football players to “sit in the parking lot, throw back a few cold ones and stare intently at the bright lights for hours on end, believing it to be daytime."
Gary Steenburgen ‘81, former Brown footballer and one of the masterminds behind bringing the enigmatic “Night Game” to Brown, reluctantly weighed in on the matter. “I sort of said it without even thinking. As a joke, you know? You can’t play football in the dark. That’s a fact.” Steenburgen then proceeded to back away, sweat through his clothes and sleep with a freshman.
