There’s something to be said about tradition.

During Homecoming week every year, the campus bursts with energy. Right around the time we start to break down under the relentless weight of papers, tests and group projects is a week-long celebration, filled with events engineered to inject us with a healthy dose of grade-A school spirit.

It’s also a week where students can connect to their past; every year, alumni from all kinds of graduating classes return to campus to revisit their roots and enjoy some good, old-fashioned pigskin.

There’s no other NIU football game quite like the homecoming game. And homecoming is the only time of the year you can convince students to flock to the Convocation Center to watch their fellow Huskies scream like animals. Not to mention there’s no other time you’ll see an armada of boats made of cardboard and duct tape floating on the East Lagoon.

Homecoming week is full of events that students and alumni alike return to campus to enjoy year after year. But at the same time…isn’t it good to change things up once in a while?

Guadalupe Barraza-Ramirez, vice president of Huskie Traditions for CAB, said students should expect to find “the same thing [we] saw last year, this year.”

I understand that certain homecoming events are staples – the football game, the homecoming court elections – and are likely to repeat year after year after year. That’s not a bad thing.

Homecoming is about tradition, but every tradition starts somewhere. There’s nothing stopping us from trying something new in an effort to leave a stamp that will reverberate for years to come.

And hey – if it fails, we’ve always got Yell Like Hell to fall back on.