AMHERST — Things were about to get crazy at the Townehouse of Amherst Condominiums, and everyone knew it.
You could tell by the cheers radiating from apartments and the police rolling around in cruisers.
Then, James White scored that game-winning touchdown, and the Patriots won their fifth Super Bowl. University of Massachusetts students went ballistic, sprinting and hopping around a snowy common area — if only for a few minutes.
Two security guards observed from the sidelines, hoisting their Maglites to maximize the lighting on the dim common. Some students were shoeless. Some were shirtless. Others wore Brady jerseys. Everyone wore a smile.
The Patriots came back from a 25-point deficit at the end of the third quarter, after all. It was objectively incredible. So the cops let the students run around.
Then the security guards rushed over to a loud banging noise. Through a horde of students, you could see some men smashing up an old big-screen TV.
Party over.
A few moments of chaos. One of the security guards switched his steady light into a strobe. A man knocked the flashlight out of the guard’s hand, who then shouted into his radio that he had been attacked.
Police flooded the common. Everyone scattered.
In one apartment, Harrison Flynn, 21, Mike Surdek, 22, and their friends were ready to break out the Scotch.
Surdek put it this way: “The only way to describe it is a state of pure bliss,” he said. “I mean, happiness doesn’t even begin to encapsulate it, I’d say.”
Flynn said, “That was absolutely unbelievable. You can’t deny how great that was.”
From the next-door apartment, someone blasted “We Are the Champions” and the alcohol flowed.
On campus, students climbed light poles and flooded common areas outside the Southwest towers. Some students who weren’t allowed into their dorms — as one student put it, police were trying to “pre-empt riots” — stood far away from the dorms watching a crowd in the distance.
In some areas, police let students who said they lived in the Southwest towers continue down the sidewalk.
One student, 18-year-old Savannah H. — who wouldn’t give her last name — said there was pandemonium near the towers. To call it rioting may be a stretch. She was unimpressed.
“It’s rioting but it’s not good rioting,” she said.
Jack Suntrup can be reached at jsuntrup@gazettenet.com.
This story has been updated. An earlier version of this story misidentified the security guards.
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