In honor of St. Valentine

In honor of it being the day of love, and in honor of the thing we love the most (other than our wives), I figured I'd see what kind of response I could get on a topical post to kill some time until tipoff.

Give us your best story in the comments on one (or both) of the following:

A) Your best Valentine's Day story; or

B) Your best Cougar sports story involving your significant other.

I'll pick the best two or three and post them tomorrow on the main page with a poll where you can pick the winner, who will receive nothing less than our undying affection.

I'll kick us off with a couple, since I take any chance I can get to brag about my wife. First, my Valentine's Day story.

Two years ago, with the Cougs in the middle of their breakout season, I scored a pair of tickets to the UW/WSU game in Seattle. Of course, it just so happened to be on Valentine's Day. Of course, my wife, being the amzing person she is, knows how important my second love is to me, agreed to go.

But as the week went on, she realized that walking from a huge parking lot to an arena and then up all the stairs to our seats at the top didn't sound like much fun for a body that was seven months pregnant. So she awesomely encouraged me to go with a buddy, thus creating one of my best Cougar basketball memories.

Of course, this should be expected from the same woman who is at the center of my other story.

I proposed to my wife back in August 2003 as I was finishing grad school at The University of Puget Sound and preparing for my first year as a teacher. We knew that if we wanted any kind of a honeymoon, we'd have to get married during a school break. That left Christmas break, spring break and summer break. Christmas seemed soon, but I was slated to take some students on an out-of-state trip during spring break and summer break was far away -- not to mention during softball season. So December 27 it became.

We started to discuss honeymoon possibilities. We needed someplace relatively cheap, but also wanted something relatively warm (at least compared to Seattle) and pretty. So we settled on San Diego sometime in September.

As we approached the wedding day, one thing started to become abundantly clear: The Cougs were probably going to play in the Holiday Bowl ... right during our honeymoon. Of course, I kept this to myself, as I didn't want to seem like I was pushing the idea of going to a football game on my honeymoon.

No, I left that one up to my dad.

We were all sitting down one day talking about the wedding and the honeymoon, and my dad says, "Hey! The Cougars are going to be playing in the Holiday Bowl. You HAVE to go! Here are your tickets!" And just like that, two tickets to the Holiday Bowl.

I looked to my wife for some kind of clue that this is OK. You know what she did? She smiled and said, "It would be better to go to the game than have you in a hotel room, miserable, watching it on TV!"

The rest, as they say, is history. San Diego was cold, but it just gave us reason to cuddle up at the game. As if I wasn't already on cloud nine, thanks to my amazingly awesome wife, I was truly floating around for the rest of the honeymoon, and I will always remember where I was when this happened:

So what's your story?