Before the Texas game, I penned a post below about the Buckeyes needing "Toughness".

In it, I referred to our then 93-year-old friend and storyteller Esther, whom regular readers may remember fell in her yard last December. Esther lay helpless in 35 degree freezing drizzle, without a coat, for two and a half hours, and when found her body temperature was eighty-eight and her hair frozen stiff. At the emergency room, they struggled 5 hours to raise her temperature to the mid nineties.

Ester survived that, as she did the first operation to replace her broken knee, and a month later a second operation to repair a ruptured tendon in the same knee, another month later a third surgery to save the leg from a staph type infection that almost took it and finally a fourth to close it up.

Ester endured all this and the past 6 months in a nursing home. Through the dark winter days and the pain and surgeries, she never lost her positive disposition, her zest for people and her sharp mind and desire to learn. I would take her a book a week. At 93, she devoured some pretty heavy reading from my personal library: The Winners Manual by Coach Tressel; The Audacity of Hope by President Obama; Miracle in the Making-The Adam Talifero Story; The Tyler Whaley Story; Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert; Tom Brokow's Greatest Generation; and recently The Worst Hard Times, a historical fiction account of the Dust Bowl Days. (Having lived through those, she probably could have written that book!)

Yesterday, after recently celebrating her 94th birthday, Ester went home.

At her age, and with all that she went through, you might be thinking of a different home. No, Ester is back in her own Pandora home. She has a little help right now, but if I know Ester, she soon will be out in her back yard, feeding the squirrels again. Her journey and determination has been an inspiration to all of us that know her.

As I said before, we know it takes toughness to be a Buckeye. But my friend Ester is a reminder that the rough toughness and inspiration is in the game of life.