Hook 'em? More like hook me.

Those goddamned bastards at TexasSports.tv -- their horns aren't so much long as they are evil, deceitful and Satanic. If I wasn't separated by a European landmass and the Atlantic Ocean to boot, I reckon I'd be liable to pull a Roy D. Mercer, go down to their main offices, and whoop somebody's ass.

Dumbfounded. Blown away. Outraged. Dazed and confused. Tired. Angry. Very, very angry.

That is Billy in a nutshell at the moment.

It's 4:07 a.m. here in Budapest; 9:07 at night under the lights of Darrell K. Royal back in Austin, where No. 2 Texas is trying to make a case for why it should be the top-ranked team in America as it butts heads with the No. 1 Buckeyes. I had planned on watching the game live from my perch in front of an open window in Attila's flat, deep in the Heart of Hungary; instead, I'm staring at a Windows Media Player window that says "TexasSports.tv/The media file you have requested is not available at this time/Check back soon for updates."

I paid $9.95 for the three-day Texas Sports TV trial, clearly calculating that it'd be cheaper to throw down ten bucks for a live Internet feed from Attila's place than it would have been had I been back in Charlottesville watching from a bar, where I would have probably thrown down twenty dollars paying for pitchers of beer -- that's why I didn't feel bad about using the "emergencies only" credit card given to me by The Bob. I could have gone out, read more of my Hungarian history book, gone to bed or done a plethora of other things with my time. But instead, I decided that watching 1-versus-2 was more important, and I set my alarm for 2 a.m. when I made the executive decision to take a nap around midnight.

I had heard rumors, of course, that I could catch the game on an actual television set -- one that doesn't constantly buffer and display a picture that goes in and out at the whim of a sputtering wireless connection. A place on Dohány utca -- Champs Sports Pub -- showed American college football on Saturdays, according to a friend of Attila's whom I talked to last night about the year he spent studying abroad at USC the year the Trojans were BCS National Champions. Hoping against hope that I could catch not only Texas-Ohio State, but Notre Dame-Penn State from a big screen TV all the way over here in Central Europe, I walked down along the 49 tram route today at around six o'clock, just to see what was what.

"We show American football tomorrow, from six," the confused Hungarian waitress told me, not understanding why that wasn't what I wanted, the difference between "college" and "pro" making as much sense to her as the difference between any two words in the entire Hungarian language makes to me.

Thanks to the priority Champs places on Manchester United games, there would be no luck of the Irish. But still, I figured I'd come across a pot of gold when it came to finding a way to see the big game, a rematch of the 25-22 thriller that Texas won in Columbus a year ago. In the age of hot spot ubiquity and broadband saturation, I figured I'd easily find a way to catch it online using my laptop and the belkin54g wireless signal that has been so good to me these past three days in Buda. Even though I had had trouble finding a live stream provider at first glance earlier Saturday morning, I knew one thing to be true:

Where there's a wifi, there's a way. All you have to do is pay.

But what I didn't count on was a tape delay.

Lesson No. 1 in marketing: Why tell someone the truth when they can discover it on their own, after entering their credit card information and clicking "I agree" to the terms and conditions that no one ever reads? I feel like I just fell for one of those Nigerian email scams. What a dumbass this naive history major is. How stupid was I to think -- since nowhere was it clearly written that this game wouldn't be part of the litany of "live Texas sports" I was gaining access to for the next three days -- that I would be getting what I was obviously paying for: A chance to see Texas continue the winning streak that began back in the days when Vince Young was a raw but talented sophomore quarterback?

What a kick in the balls.

When you're taking midnight cat naps and waking up at 2 a.m., your body clock is pretty much screwed for the next few hours. Especially when you start downing Pepsi as soon as you get out of bed, not waiting for a guarantee that staying out of bed is what you're going to want to be doing five minutes later. So I sit here, venting my frustration, and intentionally avoiding espn.com and any other website that may give me an updated score, still intending to watch the game tomorrow morning on tape delay, since that's what my ten dollars has given me the ability to do.

I studied history in college, not marketing. Thus, I fell for their little scam without the faintest notion that I was getting hosed. But I guess one thing that could come of this is a lesson: If it looks too good to be true, and it involves a Visa or MasterCard, it is too good to be true.

And with the four years of liberal arts education I just completed still fresh in my head, at least I know one thing: If you don't remember the lessons of history, then you are bound to repeat its mistakes.