Until this year Northwestern University's one claim to football fame was having broken the record for the most games lost among college teams in 1981. Now that the team has made it to the Rose Bowl, renegade fans that once rebelled against the whole ethos of winning are embracing the thrill of winning. PNS associate editor Andres Tapia graduated from Northwestern in 1983. While there he earned a varsity letter playing on NU's Big Ten soccer team.

CHICAGO -- Not too long ago, Northwestern University's pathetically inept football team made us fans the laughingstock of the nation. Our perennial fallback for self-respect was that NU boasted a higher percentage of National Merit scholars than the schools that regularly pummeled us.

What a difference winning makes! As finalists in this year's Rose Bowl, all of a sudden everyone is proud to be related in some way to Northwestern, even its host city of Evanston which has always longed for a full stadium.

The last time I remember Northwestern selling out all the seats at Dyche stadium was Nov. 7, 1981, when we were one loss from breaking the record for most consecutive losses for any football college team ever. We fans were handed "Stop State at 28" purple and white buttons because 29 losses would have put us in the history books.

Yet, except for the NU booster club and the players themselves, none of us in the stands wanted the mediocrity of a limp win. We cheered for the ultimate humiliation. And when the final whistle blew confirming our title as the worst college team on the planet, we poured onto the field to seize our only chance ever to tear down the goal posts. "We are the worst!" we chanted, parading the goal posts in front of the president's house. We finished our procession by dumping them into Lake Michigan singing "na na na na, hey, hey, good-bye!" as they sank to the bottom of the lake.

For one brief moment we rebelled against the whole ethos of winning. It was an act of liberation to be the worst and actually have fun. For the next two years we ceased to care whether we won or lost. We still showed up once in a while in half empty stands to eat hot dogs, freeze our butts, and bop to the beat of the purple and white marching band while the Wildcats embarrassed themselves on the field.

But that renegade act of liberation was short lived. And most of the NU community failed to see the fun in it. What we underestimated was the thrill of winning -- a thrill that hit home this year for the first time as the Wildcats actually won games and a nation of sports fans yelled "Go U Northwestern!"

Ever since this winning season began to pick up steam and gain national headlines, Northwestern has been blitzing me and thousands of alumni with fund raising appeals -- not just for NU's sports programs but for its academic programs as well. Of course we all know that a winning football team has nothing to do with how well students perform in school or how teachers teach. Nevertheless, the wallets are springing open.

What is it about a bunch of athletes whom we've never met moving a ball down a grassy field that prompts us to increase our contribution to the school's endowment?

Sports is a powerful community builder and giver of community self-respect. This is true across cultures. In my native Peru, in the midst of a state of emergency, curfews, a dictatorship, and a deteriorating economy, the Peruvian military junta invested millions of dollars in the 1970s to install color TV throughout the country on time for all of us to watch our national soccer team play for the World Cup finals in Argentina. They guessed correctly that a good performance in living color by our team would have the power to make us forget, however briefly, that we were hungry and censored.

And they were right. Whenever Peru would win we would spill into the streets blaring horns and passing out our national drink (pisco sour), communing with total strangers because at that moment the eleven men on a field hundreds of miles away had made us feel as one and worthwhile as human beings.

In our eternal quest for meaning and purpose, sports in just a few hours becomes a metaphor for life. There's a limited amount of time to achieve a goal. You must play with what you've got at your disposal, working together with others with different skills and temperaments, facing adverse conditions such as injuries, bad weather, or unfair decision makers.

This is the stuff of heroism. Mired in the ordinariness of grocery shopping, stupid bosses, runny noses, we crave heroics. Sports gives us a point of definition and purpose, however superficial and vicarious; it reminds us that life can be bigger than our limitations. When sports does that, it is sports at its best.

Only when sports becomes an end in itself -- when we truly believe that we're as good or as bad as the sports teams that represent us -- do we lose the game.