As a Valentine's Day gift to the Auburn University community, the town and Tigers football fans, the school re-planted their famous oaks on Toomer's Corner.
According to ESPN, the whole process of digging two places for the live oak trees was about five hours. Fans who wanted to witness it happen may have been up early, but that did not seem to matter.
"We just wanted to be here for it and see the new trees planted," Marcia Frinkel, a resident of Hoover, Ala., told AL.com. "I don't think we'll ever get the chance to see this again. It's historic."
After significant football wins, Tigers fans gather at the intersection of College Street and Magnolia Avenue to cover the Auburn Oaks in toilet paper. It may just be an old, weird tradition, but for the fans, it is far more.
"Those trees are icons to the school, to the fans, to the programs here at Auburn," Joel Stanton, a 27-year old Tigers fan, told ESPN. "You can't explain the importance of them.
"It's a tremendous joy to be able to see them. They're not just trees, they're icons."
Standing 35 feet tall apiece, the oaks arrived on flatbed trucks that made their way to Toomer's Corner with a police escort around 8 a.m.
"It's awesome," Trae Bowen, a graduate student at Auburn, told ESPN. "It's current history you're watching right now. I came because I want to be able to say in 50 years that I was here. It's kind of surreal."
Auburn University officials are asking that fans abstain from "rolling" the new oaks until the fall, just after the start of the football season, to allow them to "take root and acclimate to their new environment."
"We lost a little bit of something with the trees gone," Korey Jones, a sophomore studying nutrition science, told the school's website. "Those oaks had been here for a long time, but hopefully these oaks are going to be here for a long time. And I can say that I was there when they were planted."
