Waves and waves of fans wearing “Big Blue” came washing over Foreman Field on Saturday for the second game of Old Dominion University’s premiere season.

Fans cheering the Monarchs as they ran off-field in victory.

The opener (also a home game) was an important win, validating the huge crowd that came out to support the Monarchs. Judging from the traffic of cars and pedestrians on Hampton Boulevard, that first taste had them hungry for more. Tailgaters packed the lots. People crowded at the top of the parking lot to get a view. This one, they knew, was gonna be another big one.

But it isn’t just that it was ODU’s second-ever game. Something even more exciting was going on.

For many of these fans, this is the first time they’ve ever had a team worth coming out for. Suddenly they have something big to rally around, something to get painted up for, something to cheer.

What that means for Hampton Roads is beyond measure.

This area has an identity crisis. When I talk to people about what Hampton Roads needs in order to come together and to progress, among the most common answers I get (along with better transportation, hip neighborhoods and a strong arts community) is a big sports team. Now, most of the people who offer that response have given up hope that Hampton Roads will ever get a major league sports team. Which is mind-boggling to them, considering the caliber of athletes that hail from the area (Allen Iverson, Alonzo Mourning, LaShawn Merritt, Sweet Pea Whitaker, Michael and Marcus Vick, Plaxico Burress, Percy Harvin, and the list goes on). They concede that the Tides and Admirals are good teams and, sure, the games are fun. But no doubt nothing has captured their imaginations as college sports teams have done in places like Oklahoma, Texas or Florida.

“Virginia Tech is the only legitimate program in town,” said Alex Manley, a 21-year-old from Virginia Beach. “ODU is the closest thing to a big school that we got around here.”

Manley is a student at TCC, but he, like everyone else, donned an ODU t-shirt for the game and rooted them on as if they were his own school team.

I attended ODU myself in 2000, straight of high school, before the Ted, before University Village, and before the new Foreman Field. The campus was a bore. It was known unofficially as a commuter school, a back-up school, where local kids could get a decent university education without moving away. It was certainly not the kind of campus that suggested a real college experience.

After a couple semesters, I transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where campus life was actually thriving. Football clearly had a lot to do with it. Badger fans in red and white sweaters lent the place an atmosphere of school spirit that I hadn’t yet experienced in college. It felt like what college is supposed to be like. And even as a transfer, I felt like I was a part of it.

With Brett Favre in his last golden years at Green Bay, I also caught a bad case of Packer fever. But more important to me than the Packers themselves was being a part of something so big. The Packers are the only team in the NFL that is publicly-owned. And you can feel it. Packer pride is such that entire towns will shut down on Sunday, when shopkeepers hang signs stating simply, “Packer game,” written in green and gold. Awkward moments at the post office were easily filled in by Packer-related conversation.

In Wisconsin I was in a thriving community. And if milk is its blood, football is its soul.

Coming home to Virginia I felt like my life had become void of that comradery. Until now.

On our way to the game, one friend told us her family left at 3 to start tail-gating and another said his neighbors were on their way; to which I thought, ‘Shit, the whole town’s going to this thing.’ (Of course I was right.) As we walked up to the field with the thousands of other fans on Saturday night (also wearing our blues), I actually felt like I could cry a little. And after our third touchdown, the gentleman in front of me, seated on the other side of the press box window, turned around, put his hand on the glass and said, “High Five!” As we high-fived through the glass, nearly 20,000 other fans cheered their hearts out with us. I felt like I was a part of something again, and finally here in my own hometown.

For some that never feeling never went away.

“I have been an ODU fan my entire life,” said Gay Carpinelli, a registered nurse and Norfolk resident.

“I used to come to Foreman Field for the Norfolk Neptunes when I was a little girl. It’s phenomenal to see the field restored to this level. It brings back childhood memories.”

It’s fans like Carpinelli that Head Coach Wilder says make “the 12th Monarch,” completing the team. A former college quarterback himself, Wilder is well aware of the impact a crowd has on the men on the field.

“I thought they were loud last week,” he said after the game, “but this week was something else. Again our crowd stepped it up.”

Barring the occasions when they did the wave during an offensive play, said Wilder, the fans have become a driving force in the game. “They take it personally now when the other team grabs the football.”

Indeed, as history has shown, nothing unites a group of people like being all together against another. But in the name of the game, and for the sake of our region, it is a very good thing. For families who bonded over hot dogs in the parking lot, for students who felt proud of their school for the first time, for strangers who met standing in line for the bathroom, it’s a great thing.