I went to OSU as an undergrad... at the time, I thought OU-OSU games were crazy. Classes ended early, people went absolutely nuts. I loathed football and all college sports, until I went to Wisconsin. At Wisconsin, football is The Religion. It's the spice melange of the people who live there. They cannot survive without it (that and beer).
The fervor of ordinary Wisconsin games is an order of magnitude larger than the most contentious OU/OSU/Texas game I ever witnessed. My loathing turned to a perverse admiration of the collective spectacle. How could so many insane people have one thing in common? I realized that graduate students are similar. Sure, we don't paint our faces, or yell DE-FENSE to our buddies during their defense, but we're all fervent in our own ways. Even if we rarely talk to other humans.