I remember stumbling upon some of the old RU related use.net sites before internet browsers became available, but the text only capabilities kind of sucked, so I mostly just read posts and updates and then once the internet was really born with graphics and browsers, it was cool to see sites like KnightCourt (John O's first site), Rutgersfan.com (Keith's first site), Joel Recht's page and more.
But then, like many of you, I discovered Mike Fasano's Exit 109, which was the best RU sports site on the then nascent WWW. Loved scrolling through the white on black posts and RU stories getting my fix of RU sports news from an insider. And then when he created a message board, I was hooked - and luckily he let Keith take that over sometime in 1998 on Rutgersfan.com, which gave us a much better board and it's been like that pretty much since then, apart from the restart in 2001.
Those early Rutgersfan tailgates, with nametags for everyone, since nobody knew anyone's real name, lol, were a lot of fun, since for many of us, it was hard to find anyone to go to RU games during the Shea Error. I had 2 tix back then and half the time I couldn't even find one person to go when my wife and/or young son didn't go, so it was fun to tailgate with like-minded RU dreamers and I recall the incredible optimism when Schiano was hired and he held The Meeting and we started getting at least decent recruits. I still see Mike Fasano at an occasional football game, as he's a few rows back from us in 224
By year 3, I had my first taker on tickets and went to 4 season tix and stopped going to the Rutgersfan tailgates and that happened for many of us - but a lot of the folks who went to the Rutgersfan tailgates also went to most of the RU bowls during Schiano 1.0, which was fun. By 2006 we were up to a group of 12 and we've been 12-14 since then. Been RU848789 the entire time and started doing winter weather posts in the early 2000s, which is when I started doing weather emails; the gameday weather threads started a couple of years later. Still a shame we have no post history prior to 2015, though. What a long strange trip it's been...
