Days later the Fiesta Bowl is still noteworthy

                    

	Ian Johnson put the finishing touches on Boise State's Fiesta Bowl victory before proposing to his girlfriend on the sidelines. Steve Grayson/WireImage
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It's been 72 hours since I stood on the Boise State sideline and witnessed "The Greatest Football Game Ever Played" (I think that's a suitable nickname) and I still can't believe it really happened. Of course I know it did. All I have to do is type "Boise State" on YouTube to see how it happened more than 100 different ways or type "Fiesta Bowl" into Google News to read more than 6,000 different accounts of how it all went down. But it still seems surreal. Not just the game, the whole week.

I flew into Phoenix the day after Christmas to embark on what would be the most enjoyable assignment of my young career -- shadowing the Boise State football team from the moment they landed in the desert until they left. As I sat down to write my story after the game on the patio of a Sonoran Suite at the Camelback Inn with the sun beginning to peek through the mountains nestled around the resort, my word count was stretching well past the quadruple-digit mark and my sanity -- after having not slept a wink since last year -- was being tested.

How do I capture everything that happened to me in the past week -- the practices, the meetings, the meals, the nights out, the game -- oh my God, the game -- in my 3,000-word limit. I might as well try and fit three linemen into the back seat of my rental car, a failed task from earlier in the week.

In the end, I went way over my word count and way below the expectations set forth by one of the team's security guards who slapped me on the back after the game and said, "We just won you a Pulitzer!" While I won't win any awards for my story, it did provide me with enough leftovers for one last notes column on the Fiesta Bowl before they play some other college football game in Arizona next week.

• You never really know how these all-access assignments are going to work out. When I got the task to go behind the scenes with Boise State I thought I'd be lucky to be admitted to a few closed practices and maybe a couple of team meetings. The last thing I expected was to be greeted by the director of football operations Keith Bhonapha at the team hotel with a copy of the team's bowl manual, handed out to every player, and be introduced to the team as I stood beside head coach Chris Peterson on the field after the team's practice. "He's going to be with us all week," Bhonapha told the team. "Treat him like one of us."

• It didn't take long for the players to discover I had a rental car and nothing else to do but shadow them. More than a couple times I was called over by a player during practice who asked if I could give them a ride somewhere after. One of the more memorable trips was taking linebacker Will Lawrence to Wendy's and having him order seven cheeseburgers and turn to me and ask if I was going to get anything. "That's all for you," I asked him, as he was given two bags of burgers. "Yeah," he said. "I'll finish this off before we get back to the hotel."

• The surprise of Ian Johnson's proposal to his girlfriend, and head cheerleader, Chrissy Popadics was ruined for me three days before it happened as I sat with Johnson and a couple of Fiesta Bowl committee members at Sun Devil Stadium watching the first half of the Insight Bowl. While Johnson was talking to committee member Wes Freas he began to admire Freas' Movado watch and said he had told his girlfriend that's what he wanted as his wedding present. When Freas inquired about his girlfriend, Johnson said she was the head cheerleader and that he had already bought an engagement ring and was planning on proposing to her after the game when the couple returned to California.