So I thought I’d abandon my usual smart-ass tone this week. Generally, I try to avoid writing anything useful because nobody takes me seriously anyway and also because it requires me to devote more than 20 minutes to a column that could have been used to play “Halo.” Although you will find a lower joke-per-paragraph ratio in this column, it’s been one I’ve been wanting to write for a while.

This week I want to tell you about rugby.

Now, believe me Iowa State, we could turn this column into a humor column. There are so many stories involving nudity that would put the most solemn of people into hysterics. I could tell you about my pal Butterbean who is notorious for performing the “milk monster” wherein he runs up and down Stanton Avenue naked as the day he was born pouring milk all over himself. I could tell you about an infamous old boy that “brown bagged it” one night, which entailed him streaking up Welch Avenue with a brown paper bag over his head so nobody would recognize him. Tragically, he couldn’t see where he was going and, with not a stitch of clothing on him, ran directly into a police car (this was about 20 years ago).

I could tell you all sorts of stuff that would make you laugh, but I’d rather tell you about the game and how Iowa State played it last weekend.

There are so many reasons to love watching rugby. It is an odd mix of grace, elegance, violence, technique and force all rolled into one brilliant game that will take years to fully understand but roughly four seconds to appreciate.

If you could have seen Iowa State play on Saturday, you would have seen two Adam Andersons. You would have seen one bull his way into the try zone over a defender that outweighed him by 30 pounds. Five minutes later you would have seen another Adam Anderson find a flicker of a hole in the defense and deftly slip through the line, leaving a defender with naught but an armful of air as Anderson soared over the try line to score the game winner.

One need not be the biggest or strongest man on the field to have an impact. If you could have seen Iowa State, you would have seen Liam Wotherspoon, all 150 pounds of him, bringing down 260-pound behemoths of men charging at him like freight trains. You would have seen Iowa State’s Schalk van der Merwe, 165 pounds of scrap, running with head and shoulder lowered at a massive wall of defending white jerseys that would give way to the cardinal one of Iowa State.

You would have seen a Northern Iowa player pick up the ball, pause an eye-blink too long, and pay for it as he was engulfed by a wall of cardinal jerseys. You would have seen Northern Iowa mount its own comeback and, with Northern Iowa’s home crowd screaming themselves hoarse, you would have seen a surge of white inch closer and closer toward the try zone that the cardinal was trying desperately to protect.

Ultimately, you would have seen five years of Iowa State frustration gone, as the Cyclones beat the Panthers for the first time in a half a decade and won the 2005 Collegiate Cup trophy.

Of all the reasons there are to watch rugby, there are none so compelling as the reason to play. There is no glory in America for rugby, save the hope that a few years down the road, somebody might remember Iowa State as tough bunch of bastards. There are no scholarships or pro contracts to be earned here.

The reason you play rugby is for the gentlemen who share your jersey. What better reason to give joints and bones and blood than for your best friends in the world? Last Saturday, it was not just three names that thought this, it was the whole ISU team.

And after five long years, they finally won.