The music was playing, the crowd was cheering, and I was freaking out.

Let me back up—I’ve done karate for the majority of my life. Consequently, I became a member of my school’s Demo Team, a group of people who go around and do karate shows for the public.

When I was in my senior year of high school, I told my fellow Demo Team members that I would try my best to get us into a basketball game if I was accepted into Oakland University.

So, this being my freshman year, I went and talked with the athletics department to see about getting a performance set up this season. I had to send them some footage of us and narrow down some dates—then we had ourselves a show.

The team was thrilled when they found out; we started preparing for the show almost immediately after we knew what date we would be going out. We focused practicing a lot to make sure we would be perfect.

In the three weekends leading up to the show, we practiced for around two hours at a time; we ran through the show and endured all kinds of torturous muscle building exercises. But, all in all, it was good for us. Nobody got even remotely tired during the main event.

The day of the show, we all vented our nervous feelings to each other on Facebook and whined to our friends about how scared we were. I told my friends if they didn’t see me on Friday, it’d be because I had died of fear. None of our team members had ever done a show in front of so many people before, which made going out to perform a very daunting task.

We all arrived in the O’rena around 6 pm, got changed, got warmed up and got the rules.

We were told we could not talk to any of the players from either team or ask for an autograph. The people in charge also let us know that it was imperative we didn’t drop any of our weapons on OU’s court since it’s a very expensive floor.

At the beginning of the game, we got to high-five the basketball players as they ran out onto the court. After that, we went back into our staging area to warm up.

We ran through all of our routines one last time and stood in line to get ready to run out. With my trusty bong in hand (relax, bong is karate talk for staff), both I and the rest of the team were ready to go.

Needless to say, our six minutes in the middle of OU’s court were glorious. The team did great, the crowd was great, and we were even on ESPN3 for a whole five seconds. Being an OU student, performing in the halftime show is something I’ll probably never forget.

Later, we found out that they would like us to come back next year. Will I be terrified again? Probably, but I’ll also be very excited.

Katy Perry who? The Demo Team owned that halftime show.