Tennessee's Cory Anderson (45) outruns Kentucky's Karl Booker (10) for a touchdown during the first quarter of their game Saturday, Nov. 27, 2004 in Knoxville, Tenn.Tennessee’s Cory Anderson (45) outruns Kentucky’s Karl Booker (10) for a touchdown during the first quarter of their game Saturday, Nov. 27, 2004 in Knoxville, Tenn.

A win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win is a win. It may have been ugly, but now Georgia can’t call themselves “co-SEC East champions.” I take bordering-on-sadistic satisfaction from that result even if Auburn wipes the floor with my Vols in next week’s SEC championship game rematch as they’re expected to. See, for those of you who don’t know, I hate Georgia not only from the perspective of a Vols fan, but also from the perspective of someone who considers Georgia Tech his secondary allegiance. My grandfather played football there, my mother and a couple of my other relatives matriculated there. I grew up rooting for the beloved Yellow Jackets and against the hated Bulldogs. Even before UT broke its losing streak to Florida, and before Georgia snapped its nine-year losing streak to the Vols, I hated Georgia more than any other team. More than Steve Spurrier’s Gators. More than that rotten pack of cheaters from Tuscaloosa.

I happen to like Mark Richt in a Joe Torre-style “I hate your team and everything it stands for but I can still respect you for some strange reason” sort of way. It’s hard for me to imagine him whining like a bitch about UT trying to run up the score the way Donnan did in 1999. Donnan had both his safeties blitz during garbage time in the fourth quarter and expected Fulmer to call a run play? Get real.

It’s not just football, it’s the town itself. Nearly every time I’ve gone to Athens I’ve encountered trouble. Once at a UT-UGA game I attended with a friend, this pipsqueak fraternity boy kept nudging down the bench into my space. I wasn’t wearing any UT garb to set people around off, mind you. They had no reason to believe I wasn’t one of their own, except perhaps for being caught occasionally using words longer than three syllables. I eventually asked him to move back down the bench, and he naturally refused. We had the usual exchange of pleasantries and the inevitable stare-down, which led to a stalemate. So, I spit in his coke. The coward poured it at my feet and complained through an intermediary that I owed him a new coke, but you know how that ended.

Then another time I was at a bar with a friend downing Red Bull and vodka mixes. More assholes. There’s something floating in the air down there that seems to lower civility and IQ points. It was an elbow-to-elbow crowd. If you wanted to get by, you had to nudge people. There were no two ways about that, and I never took it personally when people nudged me. Some neanderthal shrouded in Abercrombie took it personally when I did, and slapped my face as I walked by. So I took a swing at him and knocked him down, walked back to my seat, then told my friend Peter, “It’s time to go, I hit a frat boy.”

I know at least three of my readers attended UGA, and another lives in Athens, but I can’t pull any punches here: I hate that fucking town and the school it’s built around. I can still like individuals from the school and the town. It’s similar to how I’m capable of befriending and respecting an individual cop, but hate cops in general.