The real battle Saturday will be on State Street
Rachel Aretakis mug in Lexington, Ky., on Tuesday, October 8, 2013. Photo by Emily Wuetcher
April 4, 2014
By Rachel Aretakis | Editor-in-chief
Cats and Badgers fans will sit anxiously on Saturday waiting for the outcome of the Final Four. It could all come down to the final moments of game and only one school will rise victorious.
But the players here are not the basketball teams. The players are the fans, and this competition is the battle of the State Streets.
Ever since thousands of fans attacked the street after the 2012 Final Four game, the quaint-looking road near UK’s campus becomes the temporary host to fire, charred couches and police in riot gear during the tournament. Coincidently, Madison, Wis. also has a State Street near campus, where Badgers fans flocked after their team beat Arizona last weekend.
“Students were just pouring onto the streets,” said Katherine Krueger, the editor-in-chief of The Badger Herald, one of the university’s two student newspapers. “It was like a sea of red.”
The road has risen to infamy during March Madness. #StateStreet was trending nationally on Twitter last week when UK advanced to the Sweet 16 and then the Final Four. It continued trending after Wisconsin defeated Arizona to advance to the Final Four, too.
Madison’s mile-long pedestrian street begins at a central administration building on campus and runs downtown to the Wisconsin State Capitol.
Krueger described the celebration as typical “drunken celebratory antics,” where fans climbed on top of bus shelters and uprooted street signs, passing them through the crowd. The school’s marching band even showed up, playing the fight song as they marched down the street.
But unlike Lexington’s State Street, there were no fires. It was a positive vibe, she said, with “plenty of boisterousness and drunkenness.” There were no arrests or injuries reported, she added.
UK students are likely to take to State Street again if UK wins on Saturday and then again on Monday. Krueger expects the same.
But it doesn’t matter which team wins. State Street, either in Wisconsin or Kentucky, will make the headlines. Let’s just hope there’s something left standing at the end of the night.
