counterclockwise: 29 years for a moment like this: SCUAA 2013 The LNU Way

Occasions like these get to me every time.

There is something about the silence of the waiting moment that’s not unlike a coiled beast ready to spring. It leaves the heart cold with breathless anticipation.

With the arrival of the delegates from different SUCs, the heart starts thudding ominously. Here are the athletes, proud representatives of their universities, waving their hats off to their president and to the crowd. They’re saying, Here I am, an athlete of my university, and I’m proud to tell you I come from that school and no place else. And I will do my best to carry its banner high. It is in moments like these that despite our skepticism, we emerge proud of our identities. Nationalism, loyalty, is never more nobly worn than in these instants.

Then the videos are shown. SCUAA history is revealed before us, quite tastefully. Because even though there are some misfires, hitches, what we will most remember is the determination we harbored to see it through to the end. The runner, even if he is tired, will not stop to walk. He may jog, or run quite slower than before, but he will persist, till he passes the torch to others.

While you wait, do not forget to breathe. Not yet. Not when the lanterns are lighted, not even when some of them get burned before they reach the sky. Do not lose heart. The lanterns, along with the doves, are our trusting messages to heaven – that though this is essentially a competition, there is room for virtue.

And there’s the dance. Pure body movement accented by the neon costumes and the flickering lights. My teacher, and one of the masterminds of this dance, Sir Romyr Gabon, told me once that dance, to put it in one word, is simply movement. This seemingly simplistic definition showed its true light in another way: the rhythm of your beating hearts is music enough to accompany your movements. When you see the thousand bodies moving as one, each so like the other but indispensable nevertheless, you don’t think of clones. A thousand bodies moving as one is one body moving to its own music. This is dance in its most primal, most ritualistic form. Be awed.

“Seeing you practicing late at night really broke my heart,” LNU president Dr. Jude Duarte said. What he left out for us to feel was the heartbreak of the real presentation, the culmination of those long months of hard work.

It took 29 years for LNU to host the biggest sports event in the region. Tonight, we witnessed SCUAA the LNU way. That way may be paved with heartbreak but that is so because of passion always, passion fast forward.

The burning lanterns. The flickering lights. The doves that might as well have been homing pigeons, the way some of them flew back to whomever set them free. The fireworks that always spell the promise of dreams. And that rare spirit that we mostly find in sports, the esprit de corps, that unites everyone to root for his team and cheer to the others.

No wonder occasions like these get to me. Every single time.