Zombies appreciated strong bridge

The crowd was shuffling like zombies.
And at some point, every one of us had the same thought: How good is the engineering department at Ohio State University?
Let me explain, or try to.
My wife and I have reached a point in our lives where, if an idea appeals to us, we act on it. Reminders of mortality are everywhere, so we’re more inclined to seize the day than we might have been when we were in our 30s or 40s or even our 50s.
So when I learned via ESPN that two of the top professional soccer teams in the world — Real Madrid and Paris St. Germain — had scheduled a match virtually in our backyard, we immediately decided we had to go.
The match was scheduled for Columbus, Ohio, which has a professional soccer team of its own and a strong fan base for the sport. The venue: Woody Hayes Stadium on the campus of The Ohio State University.
We’re not rabid soccer fans. But we follow the World Cup closely and this year watched a lot of both the Western Hemisphere and European cup competition.
Any sport can be engaging when you’re watching it at its highest skill level, and that’s what Real Madrid and Paris St. Germain represent, along with Barcelona and half a dozen other European-based clubs.
So before the night was over, I’d secured a couple of too-expensive tickets and a too-expensive motel room not far from campus. I also tweaked my vacation schedule so soccer night would mark the beginning of time away from work.
So far so good. The tickets arrived via mail, and later a parking pass popped up as well. The parking pass was pretty much inscrutable, listing the name of a parking lot off Woody Hayes Drive. I figured we’d sort all that out later.
And we did. Eventually.
The trip to Columbus was uneventful, and the motel was about two steps up from seedy. They were trying hard, but the place had seen better days a long time ago.
Our first clue that something was strange came just before we drove to the stadium.
There were people walking to the match. They were walking from the neighborhood of our hotel.
That seemed odd, but only a few minutes later we figured out why.
For some reason that perhaps my Buckeye friends can explain, there’s a shortage of parking for Woody Hayes Stadium.
A perennially disappointing team like Indiana University has plenty of parking. But a perennial contender for No. 1 sends people scurrying to numerous lots and garages all over the campus.
We learned this as we crept our way through traffic toward the ever-elusive stadium.
My wife kept an eye on the GPS system in her Honda while I tried not to run into pedestrians or — worse yet — traffic cops. But with every turn, we hit another roadblock. Woody Hayes Drive was close by — according to the navigation system — but we couldn’t seem to get there.
Finally, faced with the umpteenth roadblock, I showed a police officer the parking pass that I should have hung from the rearview mirror. Once installed, it worked like magic. Roadblocks? Not a problem. No entry? Sez who?
Trouble is, the magic parking pass took us back in the direction of our motel, back over a freeway and back over a river. So once we were parked, in a lot called Sisson with a bunch of buses and other confused soccer fans, we had to walk up a hill and over a long, long pedestrian bridge that took us back over the river and back over the freeway to get to the stadium.
Once there, we settled in and had a great time. The teams kept their stars on the bench, but it was still a great match, with Paris St. Germain winning 3-1.
It was only then, when we made our way out of the concrete and steel of Woody Hayes along with more than 86,000 of our closest friends, that we ran into a problem.
Remember that pedestrian bridge? Well, it turns out that a high percentage of the 86,000 needed to get across it, either to walk home or to reach our parking lot or another lot.
And the pedestrian traffic moved at a zombie-like shuffle. Eight or so people across, trying not to step on the heels of the zombie in front of us, we made our way over the freeway and over the bridge, shuffling, always shuffling.
If someone had called out, “Brains!” it would have been appropriate.
But the real brains we were concerned about were the engineers who designed the bridge. All us zombies just wanted to get home, or at least back to our seedy motel rooms.