I love Husky football. I love it even in the bad years. Even when our team went an appalling 0-12, I still watched and mourned. I love the turnaround we’re witnessing and all the hope it’s inspiring for future seasons. It’s just plain awesome.

This is my first year owning season tickets. I’d gone to the odd game here or there in the past, but this is the first season ­— in my third year of college — that I decided to put down the money and buy season tickets. Now I don’t know what the games were like during the Don James era, but Husky Stadium is an exciting place right now, and it looks to get only more exciting in the next few years.

One of the reasons I love football and all Husky sports really is that it distracts us from all of the things that divide us ideologically, while uniting us in victory and defeat as Huskies. For all the times in and outside of class, we are taught to respect each other’s differences ­— which is a very good thing by the way — and express our disagreement with words rather than fists. The one time I see absolute strangers from all points of view and all walks of life cheering as one is at sporting events.

I kid you not, I saw complete strangers high-fiving and hugging each other at the USC game this year as if they had been lifelong friends. At least I assume they were strangers because, in the joyous pandemonium, I was giving and receiving all kinds of high-fives from people I didn’t know.

What about last year during the women’s softball championship? I was watching the game on television with one or two of my Liberal friends, and we weren’t shouting at each other about health care or the president; we were talking about how wonderful it was that the UW was going to win the College World Series.

All this is not to mention how sports matches themselves help us as a society. They teach us about camaraderie, team play and hard work. They teach us about sportsmanship and honor. They taught us that racism is stupid. We all think of Remember the Titans, but what about UW alumnus Warren Moon?

Moon was told black men don’t make good quarterbacks, and, in the end, he was inducted into both the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and the National Football Hall of Fame. Or, what about when in 1936, our UW crew team showed Hitler’s athletes they weren’t as super as they first thought?

Yeah, it’s pretty cliché to write about how sports bring us together. But isn’t it a wonderful cliché? We practically have a global party over it every four years. It’s something we need, especially now, in a time of political polarization.

I will always fondly remember how the crowd that made the cameras shake — the crowd of right and left, new and old, rich and poor — rushed the field and were, for a few precious moments, all Huskies.

All I saw was purple. No Republicans, no Democrats, just purple.

Reach columnist Thomas Cloud at opinion@dailyuw.com.