WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The miracle wasn’t what was happening on the field, though what was happening on the field was rather remarkable: Purdue was beating No. 2 Ohio State, beating up the Buckeyes, moving all over the field and getting into the end zone and denying Ohio State the same privilege. This was a Purdue team that began the season with three consecutive losses, and the Boilermakers blew out the undefeated and No. 2 Buckeyes, the scoreboard showing a 49-20 victory as tens of thousands of Purdue fans swarmed the field, covering it from sideline to sideline, from end zone to end zone.
That wasn’t the miracle. Games never are, you know? But people are miraculous, and what was happening in a suite high above the field at Ross-Ade Stadium was something along those lines. It was a Purdue student named Tyler Trent, a young man from Carmel, a sophomore who has battled cancer and battled it and battled it — and here he was, at this stadium, in this suite, making a return to campus that doctors said couldn’t happen. He withdrew from classes this semester to come home, where he is in hospice care, refusing to give cancer what it has come several times to take from him.
“Had to be here,” Tyler is telling me before kickoff, though that’s not the last time I saw him Saturday night. After the third quarter, with Purdue leading 21-6 — before D.J. Knox busted a 42-yard touchdown run to make it 28-6 — I’m leaving the press box for the suite level, where the Purdue pep band has come to play the fight song outside Purdue President Mitch Daniels’ suite. One door down is Tyler, in the Purdue University Center for Cancer Research’s suite. Daniels has spent time Saturday night with Tyler as well, because Tyler is the magnet attracting the rest of us like steel shavings, and after the third quarter Tyler is sitting in his wheelchair, in his gaudy Purdue blazer, overlooking the field. Tyler is sitting next to his father, Tony, and he is beaming.
“Told you,” is what Tyler tells me, and he’s right, he did. He has been telling anyone who would listen that Purdue would win this game, which is why he had to be here, even as his kidneys are failing him and the nephrostomy tubes placed in his kidneys are failing him — the tubes leaked several times this week, sending him to the hospital — and weeks ago he lost the use of one arm and both legs.
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