On the streets are individuals, friends, and families dawning camouflage and blaze orange. The game is U.S. Army vs. UTSA. It’s not a big game or day—it’s Friday with a 6 p.m. kickoff. But it is an ordeal to go downtown and have a piece of American normalcy in a city that can boast more famous high school football programs than its universities.

My wife and I pre-gamed at the house and walked to a bus stop by our neighborhood. It’s a ten-minute walk that feels like twenty with the heat index and crappy sidewalks. We walk in the street, dabbing our heads with handkerchiefs as we make our way to the deco district. The 100 Primo bus route will take us within walking distance of the Alamodome, just north of St. Paul Square. We plan to have a cold drink and a hot bite before entering the arena, where one can expect shitty concessions and overpriced beer.

We luck out at a sports bar, where a covered patio and metal fans bring partial respite on a super hot day. The beer is iced in water, and a couple leaves a table, offering it to us as they go.

“20 dollars for the table,” the man says.

“But that guy over there was charging 18 for his table,” I say back to him. We laugh and never see each other again.

Nearby, vendors are setting up tents. One is for some kind of indigenous society. I’m not sure what they were selling. Another tent had hundreds of crucifixes made of various mediums. I don’t know if you bought one if you could take it into the dome, but UTSA will need more than a few prayers and crosses to win since the starting quarterback is injured.

The aroma of peppered meats, onions, and bell peppers overpowers the five o’clock rush hour’s exhaust, propitiating the week’s end like burnt, savory incense and offerings being lifted toward heaven. A man smokes a cigar near a fountain that has been filled with dirt and houses a happily growing oak tree. Next door to the sports bar, a CBD shop sells actual, smokeable marijuana and cannabis edibles due to a peculiar loophole in Texas statutes.

Before we head to the dome, I use the men’s restroom. There is no lock on the door. The walls and floor are painted black to hide the various human excrements and the damage caused by the kinds of downtown revelers that seem to break anything they put their hands or boots on.

It’s a five-minute walk to the Alamodome. We cross commerce. There’s a traffic jam because a freight train is passing by. We zig-zag through frustrated drivers who don’t know how to take the bus to the Alamodome. There are park-and-rides in the city. Still, the common belief in San Antonio is that buses are for poor people, and a car is a sign of success. The bigger the vehicle—like those oversized dumbshit trucks—the more successful or machismo you are. According to some people here, buses are why we have traffic problems. PS. 1 in 4 people here are either entirely or functionally illiterate. Keep on truckin’, I suppose.

We pass by Sunset Station, which has a new name that I don’t care to remember. It’s in the historic St. Paul Square, which, in my lifetime, has been historically dysfunctional and lackluster. The most successful I’ve seen this place before UTSA’s football team became an economic force was when I used to go to raves here—back when Red McCombs owned it. The collapse of the Texas rave scene started at Sunset Station when a rivalry between promoters manifested into a phony call that one of the raves was going to be where a shipment of drugs would be. The police shut the party down without evidence and found only a teenager with cigarettes. Red McCombs said, “No more raves,” which caused a series of party cancelations and searches for other venues. I think about those days when I pass by here, every time.

We empty our pockets at the Alamodome gates and walk through metal detectors. The security is less tight when I went to raves at Sunset Station, and the false sense of security this offers is laughable.

Just on the inside of the tickets are my wife’s parents. Some friends of theirs canceled, so they invited us to the game. It’s a first for me to be at a game with my papa and mama nuevos, my new dad and mom, and they do have a different sense of game day than I do. But here we are, making it happen.

The food and beer are outrageously priced, especially for a city-owned dome. People are yelling UT… SSSSSS AAAAAA. And other chants. The floor around our seating is sticker than a movie theater’s. If I dropped a quarter on the ground, I don’t believe I could have retrieved it, and if I did, my dignity would have been left behind as I pocketed what is undoubtedly a historical record of spilt sodas, boozes, and mouth fluids.

UTSA gives up a touchdown hopelessly quick. It won’t be a pleasant game, but most UTSA games contain a few great passes and bloopers. The game was honestly the least memorable part of the day. It is what I see and can’t unsee that makes the game special.

Sports are not part of society. Sports are society.

Controversial words, I know, especially from someone who is a creative like me, who has taught art like me, who has been an underemployed and misguided writer like me, who has worked in theater like me.

But sports are society. This city, San Antonio, is utterly transformed. This old part of town that has suffered economically since the construction of I-37 is revitalized. People are out, and they are doing things. They are spending time with family and friends and socializing with strangers who aren’t very strange—most are just looking to let the good times roll.

They want to eat cheap meat and drink ice-cold beverages on hot days. They want to search for parking. They want to take the bus next time. They want a win but will take a loss cause when society works as it ought to, we’re all winners.

It’s not that sports are over-emphasized. If anything, they are under-appreciated, even by the fans who do not understand the gravity of organized athletics. If done right, sports are how many people learn lifelong values like discipline, self-sacrifice, and teamwork. The rules of the games make athleticism more interesting than pure exercise. The spectators experience pride and humility in a sandbox of ideas.

I see this when I go to a game. Sports are objects to me, whereby they are subjects to others. But I know how to get up and boo the refs and cheer for a touchdown. Surrender to the game. I have to let go.

We leave the Alamodome during the fourth quarter. An old friend of ours is riding a pedicab. He owns a company that operates downtown. He offers us a ride, deftly weaves in and out of traffic, and drops us off at the same sports bar behind an illegally parked party bus.

My wife and I have a nightcap, and we walk to the 100, waiting and glowing like a ghost ship for the night’s dreary passengers. The bus security guard says he worked over 100 hours that week. The bus driver is nearby talking on the phone. We get on the bus and go home, discussing how we should go to more games in the future.

We get off the bus in the Deco district and grab a hot n’ ready pizza from Little Caesar’s. We walk home, a little more connected to the world than when the day started.