Miami ? The Virginia Tech football team carries the names in its hallowed lunch pail.

Professor Bryan Cloyd carries the memories in his heart.

Both are seeking inspiration – Cloyd in the New Year, the team in tonight’s Orange Bowl game against Kansas. They find it in the example of Austin Cloyd, a remarkable young woman who died April 16, a date that is as somber in Blacksburg, Va., history as Sept. 11 is throughout the nation. That morning, as Cloyd prepared for class, 32 people were shot and killed on campus by a student, who then turned a gun on himself and committed suicide. Cloyd’s daughter, a freshman, was one of the victims. She was in French class in Norris Hall, two buildings away from her father’s office.

Since that day, the university has struggled to recover. Cloyd has struggled to overcome his grief.

Football has dulled the ache. Football has knit together a community devastated by violence made more inexplicable by its setting – a pastoral, small-town campus in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Not only did the Hokies’ 11-2 season bring back a sense of joy, but the game-day rituals brought back a sense of normalcy.

The team dedicated its season to the 32 victims and placed a list of their names inside the lunch pail, a dented, rusted but precious old thing that symbolizes the players’ dedication to hard work. They read the names before each game and invoke them whenever they’re feeling depressed, tired or stuck.

“I think of them and I think, ‘Why, why, why?'” said defensive end Orion Martin. “They make me sad, but then they lift me up. They make me work even harder.”

It’s as if the football players are trying to fulfill the potential of those who were denied the chance. Austin Cloyd, 18, was on a path to become one of the best and brightest of her generation. An international studies major, “she was most interested in helping the powerless,” her father said. She was a volunteer in the Appalachia Service Project, often traveling to the rural, poverty-mired western tip of the state to refurbish houses. She was an activist for peace in Darfur. She taught little kids how to swim. When her family lived in Texas, she accompanied nurses across the border to a clinic for pregnant Mexican women.

Cloyd told Austin she might be the next Madeline Albright. She dreamed of working for the United Nations, the World Health Organization or the International Olympic Committee.

“So many of the 32 victims were doing wonderful things and preparing to do wonderful things,” Cloyd said. “We should be motivated by them to do what we do better. It would be a shame if we suffered this loss and didn’t do something with our own lives to make up for it.”

Cloyd, a football fan, is grateful and proud that Austin’s name is being toted around in the lunch pail, which also contains the team’s mission statement, signed by each player, and tufts of grass from opponents’ fields. It’s the sixth metal pail in a 12-year tradition, some donated by coal miners and steel mill workers, this one found by defensive coordinator Bud Foster’s wife at a garage sale. Each week, Foster bestows the pail on the most selfless, diligent player, who then carries it through the tunnel and into the stadium for the game.

“Go down the football roster and you’ll find kids just like Austin, kids who are not afraid to make a commitment to something bigger than themselves,” Cloyd said.