I admit I haven’t been the best about getting to games I’m not covering this year, so I had mixed expectations going into my first men’s basketball game. With what I’ve seen at the women’s games, I basically expected there to be roughly 50 to 100 seats filled and the band making most of the noise. For the first six minutes, I found myself to be fairly accurate, but for the final 34, It was another story.

I began my inaugural experience by choosing a nice courtside seat. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to share courtside seats at the Lakers with Jack Nicholson, so I thought I could just imagine him sitting next to me, spouting out things like “Gimme the rock, Kobe,” a la “The Shining.”

I found myself disappointed with the courtside atmosphere initially, however, as the only audible noise in the gym was that of light crowd chatter. The players’ benches were louder than the crowd in the early going. I don’t think anything was more telling about the atmosphere early on than the polite applause that would be appropriate for a first-frame strike at a PBA event when Mike DiNunno hit a three-pointer in the early going.

I even found myself sitting next to a delightful old couple that was hardly paying attention to the game. Instead, they were content to argue over which band member they knew, whether they knew a boy or a girl, whether they should wave and then the wife berating her husband for not waving.

It took a turn for the better, however, when I overheard a high school student who was with a girl who was clearly his girlfriend apprehensibly ask her if she was going to make noise, after which he let out a yelp during a free throw.

Turns out this was just the spark the crowd needed, as a man sitting directly behind me with his daughters was imbued with all the energy. Immediately, shouts of “Yeah! Rebound! Oh yeah, Huskies,” resounded throughout my cranium and apparently the craniums of others. The guy even got his daughters into the yelling as the game went on, as they would yell and sheepishly laugh after every free throw, followed by comments such as, “Wow, he’s really tall, too.”

It was strange, however, that during the last two minutes of the first half, the crowd volume returned to that equal of a gallery at Augusta. The second half was a different story entirely, as the band and crowd created a ton of noise. The team showed their appreciation after the game, and also during the postgame press conference, by running up and hugging the band members.