If you are a student at the University of Georgia, you may have caught wind of the somewhat taboo gauntlet of tasks known as the Trifecta. Said gauntlet challenges students, and any other delinquent friends of those students, to run the bases of Foley Field, climb to the top of Stegeman Coliseum and dash across the fields of Sanford Stadium under the cover of night so as to avoid any watchful police. Recently, sanctions against this UGA tradition have been upped in severity; students caught trespassing on any of these grounds after hours face criminal charges as well as a revocation of athletic tickets privileges for one year. In light of this fact, I’ve successfully completed the Trifecta three separate times (once with a gash in my jeans that ran from my upper thigh to my lower calf). While still exhilarating and rewarding, the Trifecta was old hat after a third run through. I needed something exponentially more difficult- a true challenge of cunning, agility and overall recklessness.

A lesser known, yet considerably more severe, challenge exists at the University of Missouri. Ominously dubbed the Seven Deadly Sins, this task was the end-all of stupid stunts that could possibly end in my arrest. Obviously, my participation was mandatory. The weekend that UGA played Missouri, I traveled out to the University to meet an old friend, Davis. We, along with another friend named Tyler, agreed that that night would be entirely dedicated to the completion of the Seven Deadly Sins. The night that ensued was rife with peril and good-natured trespassing.

Okay so maybe the first sin wasn’t perilous, but it was enough to get the blood pumping; it was a sort of precursor sin that eased you into the rest of the crimes you were about to commit. The first task was to shout “Fuck Missouri!” from the middle of the designated “Free Speech Zone” in the main plaza. Absolutely no chance of arrest existed, but the idea of a passerby being randomly accosted by an anti-Mizzou epithet was enough to make my group of three twenty-year-old college boys giggle with excitement. After shouting our condemnation into the empty streets, we moved on to the next task, which included a considerable increase in peril.

The second task was to mount the bronze tiger, the mascot of Mizzou, and take a photo. Perched at the corner of the main plaza, the bronze tiger was just a little bit bigger than an actual tiger and was pretty difficult to properly mount. Maybe it wasn’t the most perilous activity, but compared to shouting in a free speech circle, the possibility of falling and bruising my shin was a noticeable difference in danger. I ungracefully shimmied onto the tiger’s back, struggling to pull myself across the tarnished bronze. From the top of the statue, I knew that I was both excited and terrified for the tasks yet to come. These softball sins were nothing compared to the trials that loomed just over the horizon.

My group of three had spent some of the day casing the joint. We patrolled campus, identifying each area in which we needed to visit in order to complete the gauntlet. The next easiest task, we had determined, took place at the Quad. Six ancient pillars heralded our arrival to these trial grounds, though they seemed a bit too ceremonious for the task at hand. I felt as though these ancient structures shook their metaphorical heads in shame as we began to disrobe in an isolated corner of the field. The third deadly sin was to streak the quad, which, as I hesitantly took off my shirt and felt the bitter cold, seemed to stretch on for miles. My friends and I tucked our clothes into our backpacks and immediately began to sprint. The lawn was freshly watered; I shivered as my feet clumsily sloshed through the grass and tiny droplets of water splashed at my heels. The only thing keeping me from slipping was a powerful desire to put clothes back on an end the embarrassment. What we had failed to notice before we started running, however, was a student couple, gingerly kissing beneath the pillars, probably enjoying the crisp, cloudless evening. The three of us registered their presence simultaneously. I kept my head down and clumsily ran past. Tyler, however, took the opportunity to relinquish the shred of dignity he had left and breezed past the lovers in the nighttime, brusquely ruining their tender moment. We did not look back. Except when I dropped my phone and had to return to the quad and scour the grounds, giving the two a wave as we searched. Then, we never looked back.

The fourth sin was breaking into Faurot Field, the football stadium at Mizzou. Though technically it was smaller than Sanford Stadium at UGA, it was still a football stadium. I could feel the immensity of the structure, made all the more eerie by the complete absence of people. We circled the walls, scrutinizing the entrances to find some way to sneak in. In the middle of our search, a truck passed by the stadium with official university logos emblazoned on the side. We took refuge in a dark corner by a large gate, hiding in the shadows until the car had passed. Waiting silently, we heard the truck rumble into the distance and exhaled a sigh of relief.

“What are you doing here?” came a voice. We jumped back, startled. In our rush to hide from the truck, we had not noticed that we had taken shelter directly in the middle of an encampment of a homeless man. He emerged from the shadows, his hands trembling slightly. After the incident from the truck and now this man, we were compelled to throw caution to the wind and jump the nearest gate, into the stadium.

“Sorry!” called my friend as the three of us sprinted through the outer corridors. I was breathing hard, winded from the sheer panic of the situation. I remember my footsteps felt heavy and my friends darted ahead of me. As I rounded a corner, the stadium opened up and I could see the entirety of the structure. I burst down the steps, headed for the fifty-yard line in the middle of the field. In that moment, I felt small, dwarfed by the starry sky above the enormous concrete structure. Standing in the middle of the field, I took a moment to inhale. The crisp night air quickly supplanted my hot, agitated breaths. A cool wisp of mist escaped my mouth and I stretched my arms out. The three of us took pause before sprinting off the field and out of sight of anyone in the area.

It had been in the back of our minds since the beginning, but by the time the fifth sin rolled around, we were forced to confront it. The task was to explore the steam tunnels that ran beneath the streets of the university. In our earlier exploration of the campus, we felt the hot blasts of steam bellow from the grates. There was no way we could explore those tunnels without getting seriously burned. We considered gas masks, but even so, the steam was too much to handle. We hung our heads in resignation, unsure how to continue. Luckily, however, we stumbled upon a construction site, in which a portion of the tunnels had been unearthed. Tripping over the fences, we crept on the site, muddying our hands and knees as we shuffled through the dirt. We made sure to check for any passing police cars before dropping into the darkness of the exposed sewer pipe.

The inside was musty and cold. Moonlight cascaded in from the opening we had come through and bits of dust swirled around our landing. The only sound was our breathing, reverberating within the chasm. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we realized there wasn’t much to see. It was a dirty space, littered with trash. We tried to squeeze through an opening to follow the pipes, but it was much too narrow for any of us to fit. So, after a bit of loitering and congratulatory high fives, we exited the tunnels and continued on to the next sin.

The sixth sin was by far the riskiest. The challenge was to climb onto the roof of the main building and reach the rotunda. It seemed to me to be an impossible task. Not only was it incredibly risky to break into a school building at night, but also, at this point in time, there was a construction site surrounding the entire area with a chain-link fence enclosing the space. So as to avoid sneaking into a building, we had luckily noticed a fire escape staircase that ran all the way to the top of the building, where the rotunda was located. It was still a foolish venture, but I considered it far less reckless.

We hopped the fence and landed in the middle of the construction zone. Sidling along the walls, we snuck around to the fire escape. It was lit up by floodlights- a cold, harsh light that essentially broadcast our misdeeds to any stranger who might happen by. Again, I never said that it was the smartest plan, but it seemed to us the only way. We had committed so much already that we found it hard to just give up.

Davis hopped up onto the ledge and gingerly stepped over to the first rung. My heart was beating fast; we all knew that once he hit the first step we would have a finite amount of time for all of us to dash up the steps and onto the roof.

“Wait!” Tyler hissed. We halted immediately and stared at him in anticipation. He motioned violently with his hand, and we followed his gesture to a sign that hung just above the first landing.

“These stairs will set off an alarm when stepped on,” read the sign in authoritative, white lettering. We all paused, trying to digest the information. Part of me wanted to climb the escape anyway and book it off the scene once we were finished, but I knew that it would be impossible to execute. This was quite the roadblock; it was almost as if the university didn’t want a delinquent group of teenagers to trespass on their property after hours.

We were baffled and exhausted. We sat in silence outside of the fences, contemplating our next step. We had given it a good effort and had committed a respectable amount of petty crimes. Throwing in the towel at this juncture seemed reasonable.

“That’s it guys, I don’t think that there’s any way we can do this. Let’s call it a night,” I sighed, resigned to our fate.

“No, look!” Davis whispered to us. A man in a crisp, black suit weaved through the equipment in the construction site. He carried a briefcase and had a phone cradled in his shoulder. He checked his watch hurriedly and walked through the main doorway of the building.

“Those doors are open, we can just walk in!” Davis whispered excitedly.

“So?” I fired back, “that also means that there are people in there. We can’t risk being seen by anyone, they might call the cops on us!”

As sound as my logic was, Davis was undeterred.

“I’ll be in and out before you know it.” He assured us. He did not look at us as he said it. Instead, his mind was already inside the building, thinking about how he was going to reach the top.

“You know that your mother will blame me if you get caught, right?” I tried to force in a comment about his mother to stop him, but he had already run off, literally walking into the front doors of the building.

Tyler and I sat on a bench on the street just outside the main building. I checked my watch frequently, tapping my foot in anticipation. He had been gone for almost thirty minutes now. As police cars slowly passed by, I couldn’t help but think that he had gotten caught somehow, spotted by a faculty member and apprehended for trespassing. Before this moment, we felt above the law. Trespassing was a victimless crime and we were just fulfilling a respected tradition of the University. Would it all be worth it?

The sound of footsteps drew me from my ruminations. Davis had returned, breathing heavily.

“I made it,” he gasped.

“You did?!” Tyler and I stared in disbelief. Davis motioned for us to come closer, and we huddled around the small, bright screen of his phone. He laughed as the harsh light illuminated our faces of awe.

It was difficult to process what exactly I was seeing at first. The shot was dark, with thin wisps of light filtering in from an unknown location.

“That’s the inside of the rotunda,” he explained. I tried to table my disbelief in order to process what was being shown to me. It was indeed the rotunda; from the inside, it was far less ornate. The interior was musty and dimly lit. Old wooden scaffolding lined the walls. Like the sewers, the grandeur seemed to lie within the danger of actually completing the task.

“That’s awesome!” I told him. He held up a finger and scrolled to the next picture.

The inside of the rotunda was pitch black. On its surface were hundreds of names scrawled in white marker. They seemed almost countless, like the stars speckling the night sky. Streams of light caressed the round walls and the mural basked in the soft glow. These were the names of all the past students that had managed to reach the rotunda in years past. Though it was only a picture, I could feel the gravity of the memorial. To etch one’s name into the rotunda is to be forever engraved in the school’s history.

I was upset that I hadn’t committed to the completion of the trial. I wish that I could have laid my own eyes upon that rotunda, but perhaps it was better that Davis, a student at Missouri, should be the only one to witness it. We had done well completing several difficult tasks.

All of that was put out of my mind as freezing water crashed over my head. The final sin was to jump in the fountain on campus. I had quickly removed my shirt, dunked my entire body in the freezing waters and jumped out. The three of us sprinted across campus, shivering violently. The Seven Deadly Sins had been completed and the sun was just beginning to peek out over the horizon. As I let the intense heat from the car wash over me, I felt a catharsis wash over me. We were exhausted, yet immensely satisfied. No feeling can quite compare to a successful night of peril and good-natured trespassing.