“Hey, you got any tickets you want to sell?” asked the scalper as I walked with my family towards the entrance of the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.
“How much?” I asked jokingly. When the scalper asked me where I was sitting, I told him fifth row center court, which are apparently amazing seats because when he told me how much he would pay me for my tickets, it took my breath away.
“I’ll give $2,000 cash for all four tickets.”
$2,000 for tickets I received as a gift from Dove Men’s Care + to enjoy with my family! That’s 2,000% profit! $2,000 is a trip, a real trip to someplace with characters and warm weather and $10 hamburgers. $2,000 is a new bathroom for the kids. $2,000 is the Bose insane sounding thingy that I always play with at Best Buy. $2,000 is a lot of found money for something my son is only moderately interested in watching.
“You got it,” said the red devil on my shoulder.
“Don’t you do it,” said the white devil on the other shoulder
“Dude, shut up, this is too large, we are taking this dude’s money and heading south!”
“It’s a gift, you can’t sell a gift. What kind of example would that be to the boy,” the white devil said.
Before the red devil could answer WIFE cut him off and said, “come on we’re going to the game!”
With that, we marched into the Bradley Center to watch Michigan take on Texas. As I mentioned, my son wasn’t super excited about the whole thing. However, we had three generations of family together to watch the game: my father-in-law, my wife and the boy. If we could at least get a picture of the three of them smiling, it would be worth the drive.
As we walked through security and they made us throw away the signs my son had spent an hour making, the “oh sh*t alarm” went off in my head. Sirens blaring in my brain “WARNING, this is going to suck, WARNING, WARNING, you just blew $2,000, WARNING.”
Instead of crying (which is the usual reaction) the boy let it go, he was already looking around at the stadium with wide eyes. Though it was our first time to a March Madness game, this was his first time to an event of this magnitude and the smile on his face showed it.
Experiencing the games, the music, the cheering, and the food all through his little eyes made the games more magical that we could have ever predicted. We yelled, sang, jumped up and down, shoved popcorn into our mouths and high fived each other for hours. When it was finally over not only did we get the picture I had hoped for, but new memories that will last us a lifetime.
Admittedly $2,000 would have been nice to have, but the memories we made are worth much more than $2,000 and those will never go away.
