"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation or Longhorn fans comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Driscoll half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the 360 bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing khaki shorts and a Longhorns jacket . . . booming through Westlake at the lights of radio towers not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end. . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was about the Longhorns: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the river, then up to North Austin or down 35 to San Antonio. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than twenty years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Austin and look East, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back for the tide."
-bastardized quote by Hunter S. HOOKEM4