So I am proud to tell everyone that next year I will be a Gopher at the University of Minnesota.
"I grew up on a ranch, and I can still probably kill a gopher at a fair distance, but what we were taught is you don't take your guns to town," she said.
I used Gopher at my university's library, where the entire card catalog was indexed in a Gopher space.
He serves with a frowning, almost comical concentration, as though he's hammering in fence-posts or bashing gophers at a fairground stall.
He played for the Gophers, at the University of Minnesota, and after taking over the coaching chores there, led them to three national championships.
Minnesota was coming off of a home-and-home sweep of St. Cloud State but the Pioneers returned the favor and swept the Gophers at Magness Arena, winning 5-3 on Friday and 4-3 in overtime on Saturday.
Last time she went home the first item on the community-events page in the local newspaper said, "Drop off dead gophers in bags of not more than eight gophers at our freezer," which kind of sums it up.
McLeod, a former close ally of Palin's who had helped her to launch her statewide political career, was an eye-witness to many of the machinations of Miller, Bailey, Fulton and Palin's longtime gopher, Ivy Frye, at the convention.
Even if he was merely showing me the right way to pull up a weed or to dig a hole to trap a gopher gnawing at the roots of an orange tree, or tamping down the compost heap back of the chicken shed, the old Hassidic energy emerged in melodic glory, thanking G-d for always creating something new.
Now the optimism has faded, crushed by consecutive Big Ten losses to Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern and Wisconsin — the fifth time in the last three seasons that the Gophers lost at least four in a row in conference play.
You'll still leave Mom and Dad behind for four years at Gopher Junction College, but rather than listen to the duds on Gopher's faculty, you'll troll the Internet for courses; or maybe Gopher will furnish the Cornell science curriculum, or the GEN European History curriculum, with the school's own faculty serving as "learning facilitators".
