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This weekend, I'll be the loneliest guy in Ute Nation.

Most weeks, as a 20-year Salt Lake City transplant whose wife attended the University of Utah, I root heartily for the Utes football team.

Not this weekend.

This weekend, for the first time ever, the University of Washington Huskies will visit Salt Lake City to play the Utes, their new Pac-12 competition. And in a sea of red, I'll be one of the few guys in town wearing purple.

Yes, I'm a Husky.

Most weekends, I search the listings, wondering whether the gods of regional cable TV would deign to broadcast a game from the hinterlands of Seattle. Some seasons — like the infamous 2008 season, when the Huskies went 0-12 (the only Division-I team in American to not win a game) — the search was fruitless. And probably just as well.

It wasn't always thus. Strangely, I'm a bigger Husky fan now than I was 25 years ago, the year I graduated from the University of Washington.

Twenty-five years ago, I edited the Homecoming edition of The Daily of the University of Washington, the student newspaper where I labored for four-plus years. (I overshot the four-year plan by a quarter — the price of having to work my way through school.) I attended the Homecoming game that year, and realized that it was only the second Husky game I had attended in the five seasons I was a student.

As a student, I looked at Husky football as an irritant more than a tradition. I saw the football players who lived in my dorm as oversize children of privilege, getting a free educational ride when I was washing dishes, writing for the student paper, and running up thousands of dollars in student-loan debt.

In my dorm, there was an unwritten rule that students living below the fifth floor should take the stairs rather than the elevator. This was a rule the football players regularly ignored.

One night, I recall, I rode the dorm elevator up with two lumbering linebackers and a young woman who lived on my floor. The football players got off the elevator on the third floor. After the doors closed, the woman said conspiratorially, "No wonder we didn't get to the Rose Bowl this year."

When I attended U-Dub, the Huskies could do no wrong. The team was in the middle of a nine-year streak of bowl appearances (from the 1979 season to the 1987 season). Coach Don James gave a game ball to Ronald Reagan during a Seattle stop on his 1984 re-election campaign, and even in liberal Seattle the moment caused barely a ripple of controversy.

Of course, the 1984 season was when the Huskies won the national championship.

Yes, I know you've heard that some team from Utah — Brigham Young University's Cougars — were the national champs in 1984. That's wrong, and nothing in my heart of hearts will ever convince me otherwise.

BYU played a string of nobodies, beat all of them, and finished with a win in the Holiday Bowl — the Holiday Bowl!?!?! — over an unranked Michigan. Meanwhile, the Huskies went 11-1 (mention the loss to USC and I'll stick my fingers in my ears and say "la, la, la, I'm not listening"), went to the Orange Bowl and beat the second-ranked Oklahoma Sooners — and their freakin' Sooner Schooner.

That 1984 season solidified two things in my brain: The stupidity of deciding a national champ via a poll (which is only slightly dumber than deciding the national champion by a computer-aided poll rigged to favor a few power conferences — you know, the system we have now), and my dislike for BYU.

Who knew that, years later, I would be living in Utah — where disliking BYU would actually come in handy, and smooth my transition to becoming a Utes fan? (And who knew that I would be rooting for a coach, Steve Sarkisian, who actually played for BYU?)

Today, of course, I consider myself far more cynical than I was as a college student — and I loathe the hypocrisy of college football, and the way everyone involved winks at the players' "amateur" status in what is, in reality, a multibillion-dollar sports-entertainment complex.

Even so, I'm still a Husky fan. Even if I can't be at Saturday's game at Rice-Eccles Stadium, I'll be humming "Bow Down to Washington" in my heart. After the game is over, I'll go back to my dual citizenship — where it's OK to root for my Huskies and my Utes.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Contact him via email at movies@sltrib.com. Follow him on Twitter at @moviecricket or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/themoviecricket.