The game was done. The day was won. Miami players celebrated. Coach Mark Richt shook hands with Georgia Tech coaches and hand-signed a "U" as the band played the school alma mater.
The watergirl wasn't celebrating just yet.
"The work's not done," Mark's wife, Katharyn, said.
Sweating and wearing a ball cap, she cleaned a fold-up table of paper cups on the Miami sideline. She emptied five-gallon Gatorade containers. She put plastic water bottles in order and helped others cart everything to the locker room.
She proved on another Saturday that behind every good man -- about 10 sideline yards behind during games, in this case -- there can be a tireless woman working in such anonymity players don't know her just yet.
"This is a fun day for me," she said.
Does this help explain this next, family-friendly era of Miami football? Or at least better explain the Richts?
This all started more than a decade ago when Katharyn felt alone as her husband coached Georgia games. Other coaches' wives often didn't travel. She saw some help was needed working the water table behind the bench. Why not her?
Or, perhaps, this started in 1985 at Florida State. Mark was a graduate assistant coach then. His roommate, another graduate assistant named Jay Perkins, was dating a student who was Katharyn's roommate.
"I need to meet a nice girl," Mark said.
"I've got the perfect one for you," Perkins' girlfriend said.
They set up a blind date. A hurricane was approaching, much like Hurricane Matthew is approaching now. The boys went to pick up a movie. They saw the girls in the store getting food. That's the first time the future Richts met.
The movie they watched?
"Do I have to tell you?" Mark said, smiling. "It's a classic."
He pauses.
"Animal House."
He laughs, a man of 56 now.
"Shows how awful I was to pick that kind of movie for my first date," he said.
They married in 1987. They became committed Christians. They raised four children. Mark went from Florida State's offensive coordinator to Georgia's head coach. Katharyn sculpted out her identity, too.
When the family went to Honduras for missionary work, she helped in a hospital. One night, a woman gave birth with the help of a midwife. That got her thinking, as she later told her husband, "If something went sideways, I couldn't have helped."
That event, plus her work at a Christian health center in Athens, Ga., prompted her to study nursing. She recently graduated from nursing school and, upon moving to Miami, got certified in Florida.
Of course, the move meant changes for the Richts, now married 29 years. This was a different stage for them, too. Their oldest child, Jon, 26, a former Buffalo Bills coach, joined Miami's staff as quarterbacks coach. The other three children are in college.
"We're empty nesters," Katharyn said. "That made it easy. We were able to choose a home just for what Mark and I wanted."
And the change in school wardrobes?
"Orange is the new black," she said of changing colors from Georgia to Miami.
Their path now takes them against the school where they met, married and started a family. It's not as odd as it once was. In Richt's second year at Georgia, he beat his Florida State mentor, Bobby Bowden, in the 2003 Sugar Bowl.
"That was, maybe, a little harder than now because we knew a lot of the people at Florida State from Coach Bowden to the staff," Katharyn said. "Now I don't know that many. It's not really the same."
She'll be at her post Saturday night. Behind the sideline. Behind the fold-up table, pouring water into cups and mixing Gatorade. It beats entertaining people in a suite during games, she said.
South Florida has had its share of uniquely successful football marriages. Don Shula asked his wife-to-be, Dorothy, to backpedal to see what kind of football genes their kids might have.
But this is a fun first. A coach and a watergirl. They don't talk during the game -- "We're busy," Katharyn said -- but Saturday at Georgia Tech they were in a familiar pose after their work was all done.
Hand-in-hand, they left the stadium.
Sports on 10/06/2016