DUBLIN — Claire Coutras booked her flight five days ago.

The 2023 TCU graduate still lives in Fort Worth, and her friends were too busy to come to the Aer Lingus College Football Classic. She came anyway.

“I would rather go alone than not go at all,” she said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

All week in Dublin, versions of that decision have been strolling around in purple.

Ahead of Saturday’s college football game at Aviva Stadium, TCU fans have filled pubs and sidewalks across the city. Some planned for a year. Some came with family. Some came alone.

Marah Nelson started working on the trip as soon as she heard about the game.

She isn’t an alumna. She moved to Fort Worth for work in 2009, went looking for a football team and found TCU. Now she has season tickets in the north end zone and donates the ones she can’t use to veterans.

Nelson flew to Ireland alone and landed Friday morning.

“I couldn’t sleep on that plane,” she said. So she dropped her bags at the hotel and went walking.

Terry O’Grady grew up in Fort Worth and has been a TCU fan her whole life. She came with her friend Terrie Farris of Decatur, whose two children graduated from TCU. They spent three days in Scotland before reaching Dublin on Thursday.

Their first stop was Fitzsimons.

“It was a blast,” O’Grady said.

The multistory Temple Bar pub has become a gathering place for Horned Frogs this week, purple from the ground floor up.

Larissa Clemente, a server there, said the Horned Frog visitors have been excellent company.

“They’re pretty nice people, actually,” she said. “Super nice.”

Some journeys carried more history.

Dana McAlpine and her husband live in Alaska. Their son Sean enrolled at TCU in 2002 and would have graduated in 2006. He died in a car accident.

His parents kept their season tickets.

They still keep up with his fraternity brothers, passing along tickets they can’t use. The McAlpines visited Dublin last year. When they learned TCU would play here, they decided to return.

“Just to see TCU,” she said.

Students made the crossing too.

Titus Fagan, TCU’s Student Government Association president, arrived Friday morning and flies home Sunday. An accounting major with Irish ancestry, he had never given much thought to working overseas.

“This trip has kind of made me rethink it a bit,” he said. “It’d be cool to come work here someday for sure.”

What surprised him most was the scale.

“Just seeing how much purple is everywhere, all the TCU fans — I didn’t expect it.”

By Friday, that purple had spread across Dublin.

TCU students spent the morning at Google’s Irish headquarters pitching business cases alongside students from North Carolina and two Irish universities. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Alamo Letter Society dedicated a plaque honoring Irish soldiers lost at the Alamo. Several thousand fans gathered at Merrion Square for an afternoon pep rally before the crowd moved to the Guinness Storehouse.

Jacqueline Gordon watched it all from a different angle.

She and her husband, Paul Gordon, now live in Belfast, where he is working on a doctorate in psychology. Jacqueline came down to Dublin wearing a TCU hat with a shamrock on it.

Then she found herself in a room full of people dressed like her.

“It’s just so surreal,” she said.

She looked around.

“Fort Worth came to us.”

– Caroline Collier