UMass Homecoming is an annual autumn weekend at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, bringing alumni, students, families, and the surrounding town together around football and campus tradition. I was assigned to cover both days. It was also my first full immersion in something Europe has no equivalent for: tailgates running since breakfast, a marching band, face paint on every child in sight, and an entire community organized around a single game. Photographing it as an outsider turned out to be an advantage. Nothing had become ordinary to me yet.