The parking lots near the O’Rena are filling up. The noise of the crowd and the sound system spills into the campus air. OUPD is making sure nothing goes wrong and a giant bus from out of state waits in the darkness.

It’s game night at Oakland University.

Aside from being known for our strikes, bad slogans and a newspaper with a hilarious satire section, OU is known for its basketball teams.

I grew up sticking with only two teams: The Detroit Red Wings and the Michigan State Spartans. My high school had a piss-poor excuse of an athletics program and our best team that competed against other schools was the marching band.

So for me, I finally get to call a team my own. These are my Grizzlies.

My first Grizzlies game was against Michigan State, when they played at The Palace of Auburn Hills in 2008. I bought my Spartan alumni dad tickets as a Christmas gift. In a sea of green-and-white, I was one of only a handful of black-and-gold clad underdogs.

Yeah, my team lost, and yeah, dad rubbed it in my face the entire ride home, but it was still awesome. Since then I’ve tried to go to as many games as a commuter such as myself can.

Last week I went to the men’s basketball game against UMKC. The fighting… kangaroos?

Listen, I don’t mean to brag, except for right now when I’m blatantly going to brag. Our mascot is a flesh hungry, man-killing threat to America — in gold. Not only are we badass, but we’re badass with bling.

Kangaroos are the goofy looking symbol of a country a lot of people forget about. Why the hell they are the mascot of a Missouri school is beyond me.

I went to the tailgating event held inside the Rec Center. I felt weird eating pizza and hot chocolate while everyone around us was burning calories, but it was free, and therefore delicious.

I then found a seat in the student section and sat behind the OU men’s swim team, clad only in their swim briefs, bringing a whole new meaning to “showing your support.”

When the Grizz tossed free shirts into the audience, I was hoping to get one. The girl three seats to my left got one, and then looked at the tag.

“Oh, extra large, um, here you go,” she said, handing it to me. Score, the big guy wins again.

At some games, you can find Clawzz, our team’s pretty pointless secondary mascot. He’s a darker bear with a small head and really nothing more to talk about. The Grizz could easily kick his ass. I’d pay to see that.

They have these fun little games for students to play during “media time outs.” I know we’re a big enough school to have media attention for our games, but we’re small enough where “media time out” means the cameraman has to pee.

These games include a damned impossible full-court mini-putt attempt and having little kids dance for gift certificates. It’s always the smallest and therefore cutest kid that wins the audience over.

The OU cheerleading and dance teams are there to pump up the crowd. I’ll keep it classy and just say that watching them move made me curse every scratch and defect in my glasses.

There’s something about being part of a large group chanting and clapping at the same time. It’s the closest thing you can get to an angry mob without all the chaos and destruction. Screaming “Warm up the bus” in unison with hundreds of people when we clearly won is awesome, a sadistic glee normally reserved for beating someone up. Not that I would know.

Watching Drew Maynard dunk, Johnathon Jones shooting 3-pointers, Keith Benson and Ilija Milutinivic making the other team look like midgets, and Coach Kampe creating brand new profanities to use on the refs are all things that could only happen at the O’Rena. Anyone who says Oakland’s president Dr. Gary Russi is elusive obviously hasn’t seen him sitting courtside at almost every home game.

We wound up beating UMKC 87-73. It got close toward the end, but we still dominated. It was so much fun I decided to go back two days later when we played against the Southern Utah University Thunderbirds. No, seriously, they are called the Thunderbirds.

I don’t know much about Utah aside from Salt Lake City and the whole Mormon thing, but I now know this: Clearly, they don’t play much basketball in Utah. We trounced, trampled, decimated, obliterated, and various other ways of saying embarrassingly outplayed them, 99-53.

There are two types of fun games to be a part of. UMKC-style games, where it’s at least close, there is a sense of struggle, and every point matters. And then there are SUU-style games with a hilarious blowout, with the entire collection of Grizzlies fans laughing in smug awesomeness.

If OU scores over 80 points in a game, the whole crowd gets coupons for a $4 medium pizza from Hungry Howies. If we make at least five 3-pointers, we all get $5 off at BD’s Mongolian Grill. Free pizza before the game, free clothes, coupons for money off food, AND our team is number one in the Summit League, completely free to students — Why wouldn’t you go to a game?

And it’s not just the men’s games that are fun to go to; our women’s team is still strong in the conference and impressive on the court. I was at the game when star player Carnago unfortunately injured her knee. When she hit the ground, I joined the rest of the O’Rena in thinking “Holy crap that had to hurt.”

Whenever I ask sports editor Dan Fenner if I can tag along for the post-game press conferences, he tells me I wouldn’t be interested. Clearly he is lying to me and covering up. I’m guessing the team opens up champagne and brings in strippers and wild animals and stuff.

The coolest part of the O’Rena now has to be the giant-ass screen we just got for our scoreboard. The student section is on the opposite side of the court from the screen, but it still looked amazing.

I kept thinking, how hard could it be to set up a DVD player to that screen and the loud system and play a movie? Move the nets, dim the lights, charge people a dollar or two and play something college kids will like, maybe “The Hangover” or “The Departed.” Movie night in the O’Rena? Have the frats and student orgs volunteer to run the thing and donate all the money to Haiti or a local charity or something. We can totally do this, athletics department. You can borrow my DVDs if you want, we’ll just ignore the copyright infringement.

When you go to a nOU basketball game, you become part of something bigger. You become the screaming, win-hungry mob following a dominating steamroller of a team which is steadily on it’s way to winning the Summit League and into the NCAA basketball tournament.

The next home game isn’t until Feb. 4, which should be another easy win against Centenary College, followed by our Feb. 6 Homecoming game against the soulless, baby-hating, tax-evading evildoers of Oral Roberts University.

I’ll see you at the games. We are an amazing university with amazing teams. We are the Golden Grizzlies, hear us roar. And enjoy free stuff.