I live in the city just east of South Bend and I'm a converted ND fan. I used to watch the ND replays on Sundays as well and was pretty much indifferent to them until Theisman being with the Redskins,.then Montana.
Then they got the TV contract and I was like a lot of people, "Oh they think they're hot" and so forth. Then I met someone online and decided to move out here from NJ in '98. My one friend of almost 25+ years even said, "But you can't stand Notre Dame!" when I told him I was moving out here.
When I got out here, yep... Almost everyone and their mother are Notre Dame fans including the woman I had met. She would talk about the good old days with Ara and Dan and I would be pretty much apathetic. She'd watch the games every Saturday and I would just go off and do something else. Then in 2001 they had that bad season and we would see Bob Davie's, excuse making, shoulder shrugging face on all the local news conferences and I got to feeling sorry for those players. Some of them weren't bad and they gave it their best but it was clear they had less than great coaching.
Then my mother came out to visit the next year. She's a diehard Catholic who always wanted to see Notre Dame and had a friend who wanted pictures of the basilica, etcetera. It was the first time I had visited the campus and I have to say, there really is something about the place. The campus, the stadium, there really is kind of an aura there and I'm not the sort to romanticize such things. I've been watching their games religiously since that year. I look forward to Saturdays almost as much as Sundays and I was never really a big college football fan to begin with. I just found myself rooting for them and I have since.
My sister-in-law and her husband have both worked there for 15, 20 years and get an inside track to tickets every year but I've never seen a game live. He works with a gentlemen in something of a business venture where let's just say they make something of a profit with their tickets, despite that sort of thing being generally frowned on. I'll go one of these days though.