But the memories? Priceless.

That’s how Sandy Moore looks at it, anyway.

You remember Sandy. He pitched for North Rowan High, the RowanCounty American Legion team and then for Catawba College. He graduated from Catawba last spring and is now a graduate assistant with the baseball program at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

But the grad assistant job is pretty much a volunteer position. He pays the bills with his job as a member of the school’s athletic grounds crew, a vocation which put him on the sidelines at every home football game during this season of the century for the orange and maroon Hokies.

In December, Moore started hearing from other members of the crew that they had received two coveted tickets for the Jan. 4 Virginia Tech-Florida State Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans that would decide college football’s national championship.

“I was getting tired of hearing about it,” said Moore. “But then, out of the blue, I got my two.”

Moore’s father, Jack, was supposed to make the trip with Sandy, but was felled by the flu bug. That opened the door for Sandy’s little brother, Daniel, the current North Rowan High pitching star who has already agreed to hurl for the University of North Carolina.

Moore’s mother drove Daniel to Blacksburg to meet Sandy for the bus ride down on Jan. 2.

“I’ve ridden a lot of buses in Legion and college, and as buses go this one was top-notch,” said Sandy. “There were some complainers. But come on, what’d they expect. This was a bus — not an airplane. They fed us good and we had movies. Anyway, I’d have jumped on a train if that’s what it took to get down there.”

It was a Virginia Tech bus all the way, so the folks in charge did their best to prepare fans for the game.

“By the time we got there we were more than ready,” said Sandy. “We all had beads and Hokie hats.”

And Bourbon Street? Well, it was Bourbon Street.

“People were wall to wall,” said Sandy. “The streets were packed with Virginia Tech fans. We didn’t see any Seminole people, but we didn’t wander away too far from the hotel, either. We didn’t want to put ourselves in the hands of the city of New Orleans.”

Sandy explained that Daniel was a little stunned on his first night in the Big Easy.

“Hey, he’s usually in bed when things are just getting started down there,” said Sandy. “He was overwhelmed at first. But the more he was there, the more he was loving it.”

The younger Moore even claims to have spotted Seminole star Peter Warrick out on the town — well after curfew.

“We were on the lookout for celebs and it might have been Warrick,” said Sandy. “It sure looked like him.”

The excitement level intensified another couple of notches on game day.

“Just walking to the SuperDome with all those people gave you chills,” said Sandy. “I’ve been to pro games, but this was different. With every step you took, the crowd got a little larger.”

The Moores found their seats in a lower section of an end zone, with their backs against a wall.

“The guys beside me were complaining that they had a lot better seats in Blacksburg,” recalledSandy. “I told them I did to, that I was right there on the sidelines. But just to be there, I mean, how could any seat for that game be a bad one?”

The Moores got a charge when the Florida State kickoff return team came on the field. Kannapolis freshman Nick Maddox was part of that unit, and Daniel told everyone within earshot about how he used to kick off to the Wonders’ No. 20 when he handled those chores for the Cavaliers.

“We kept the cameras on Nick just in case,” said Sandy. “It was a weird feeling. It was neat to be able to tell people that No. 20 was from the same part of the world that we were. We know how good he is. Three years from now, he might be Peter Warrick. He’s just waiting his turn.”

But on this night, Maddox only ran back one kickoff and got belted pretty good for his trouble.

Watching that play unfold from her seat on the 45-yard line, 10 rows up with the Seminole family members, was Maddox’s mother, Pat. She had made the trip by car with her cousin and daughter — a tiring trek that wound through Atlanta, then Montgomery, then Mobile, then Biloxi, before finally reaching New Orleans.

“The Virginia Tech people all went ‘Ooooooh,’ on that kickoff return,” said Pat. “But when I asked Nick about it after the game, he said he didn’t get hit all that hard. They just lifted his legs off the ground, so he went down.”

Pat Maddox says that Nick enjoyed his first year as a Seminole despite limited playing time on an obviously loaded team.

“He had a 2.9 GPA (grade point average) and he’ll get three rings (for the Sugar Bowl, the national championship and for being ACC champs). Those are the things that are important to him,” she said. “Nick couldn’t be happier.”

The Moores, on the other hand, could have been a lot happier— if the Hokies had won. But even with quarterback extraordinaire Michael Vick on the Hokies’ side, Florida State in general and Warrick in particular proved to be too much.

Still, the score of the game was forgotten within hours. And that’s when the real importance of the Moore brothers’ days and nights in New Orleans started to sink in.

“Daniel and I were able to do something that comes along once in a lifetime,” said Sandy. “I got a chance to just sit and talk to Daniel and spend time with him. With me in Blacksburg and him getting ready to go off to Chapel Hill, who knows when we’ll get that kind of opportunity again?”

But Sandy quickly got that serious moment out of his system.

“One thing’s for sure,” he chuckled. “Daniel had a better time in New Orleans than he would have had those first two days back at school at North Rowan.”