ITHACA, N.Y. – As his fluids and heat transfer lab wound down on Friday afternoon, senior Dustin Gibian couldn't sit still. Somewhere across campus, he knew, the line for the Great Wait was either already forming without him or still waiting to be started and he was determined it would be the latter.

"I was really worried. My blood pressure was up all day, all night yesterday, thinking I have to run from class to the rink," Gibian said.

He'd been checking on the rink for a day straight, driving by the night before and again that morning just to see if anyone had beaten him to it. When the lab finally let out, he rushed straight from class to Lynah, arriving a little after 2:30 p.m. There was no one there. He was first.

"It was great. I felt relieved," Gibian said.

The scene marked the return of a Cornell hockey rite of passage that had gone dormant since 2009, when a swine flu outbreak forced it off campus — and its comeback did more than fill a rink with tents and sleeping bags. Woven into Cornell Unplugged, the university's weeklong push to trade screen time for in-person connection, the Great Wait turned into an overnight crash course in community for a generation of students who'd never experienced it, one card game and shared snack at a time.

"The Great Wait was about so much more than purchasing season tickets," said Laken Kelly '19, Interim Associate Director of Athletics for Engagement & Partnerships. It was about creating, she said, "the sense of community that makes Cornell hockey so special."
 
A mechanical engineering major from Ithaca, Gibian has held Cornell hockey season tickets in each of his three years on campus, but this year he wanted more than a ticket — he wanted to help revive a tradition he'd only ever heard about. Cornell hockey is family business for Gibian: he grew up attending games with his father, and his grandfather, George Gibian, served as the Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, tying the Gibian name to the university long before Dustin ever set foot on campus.

He wasn't alone for long. About two hours later, a group led by members of the Seal & Serpent Society arrived and settled in behind him.

"We showed up in line at 4:30 p.m.," said graduate student Armen Abrahamian '24. "We have so much pride in the institution and it's pretty incredible to cheer with our classmates, for our classmates, and know that it helps our success on the ice."

The group brought their own poker table and invited students around them, Gibian included, to pull up a chair.

What started as a handful of students staking out spots in the early afternoon gradually grew, then expanded quickly as food was shared, music played and card games settled. Overnight temperatures dropped, but the line didn't thin — if anything, it kept building as word spread across campus.

By sunrise, the line stretched well past the entrance to Lynah. The Big Red Pep Band and cheerleaders got the crowd warmed (and woken) up at 7 a.m., and members of the Cornell hockey team stopped by to thank the crowd and run through some trivia on Big Red hockey history. The event drew a group of familiar faces from Cornell Athletics leadership, including Casey Jones '90, the Jay R. Bloom '77 Head Coach of Cornell Men's Hockey, as well as Ryan Lombardi, Vice President for Student and Campus Life, and Dr. Nicki Moore, the Meakem and Smith Director of Athletics and Physical Education.

"There's nothing like the energy of the Lynah Faithful," Jones said, "and seeing students lined up again like this is exactly what makes this program special."

Precisely at 9 a.m., Gibian and the rest of those in line started filtering into Bartels Hall to purchase their tickets and officially join the Lynah Faithful. By the time the doors closed, more than 250 individual students had bought nearly 350 student tickets between them

"The greatest traditions are those that evolve while carrying their meaning forward, and bringing the Great Wait back allowed a new generation to make this tradition their own," Kelly said. "This was more than the return of an iconic Cornell Hockey experience — it was the beginning of something bigger."

"As soon as I saw the message, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to be first in line," Gibian said.

The turnout suggests he won't be alone in that thinking for long. He expects the lines to start even earlier in years to come, with more tents and more students following the lead he and his new friends set this year.