Securing season football tickets is one of the most nerve-wracking, high pressure situations you will find yourself in during your four years in Happy Valley.

One bump in the road, such as typing your credit card information in wrong or having slow and spotty internet connection, could cost you your spot in the best student section in the country. In the past, nothing made this more clear than just how fast season tickets sold out.

Take last year’s seniors, for example. Their tickets sold out in just three minutes. I repeat, three minutes. And the inexperienced freshmen? They had quite an impressive outing as well, filling up the remainder of the student section in a little more than nine minutes. Not bad, Class of 2022 (*pats self on the back*).

So why then, did it take this year’s senior class a whopping total of 28 minutes to sell-out? Did they lose their magic touch from the previous three years? Highly unlikely.

The increase in times can mainly be attributed to changes on Ticketmaster’s website, particularly the addition of the smart queue. Now, you are prompted to join an online waiting room where you’ll be given a random number in the queue prior to shopping for tickets. If you log on after 7 a.m., you will be placed at the end of the line.

You’ll then wait in this “virtual line” until it’s your turn to go through the process of rushing to buy tickets as fast as humanly possible. But this new update is anything but smooth. You can spend as long as twenty minutes waiting for a turn, depending on how early or late you joined the waiting room.

From there on out, you’re pretty much stuck staring at the computer, hoping the daunting number of people in front of you will shrink rapidly and that the little stick figure icon on the screen will keep moving to the right.

It’s practically a guarantee that you will experience an extended wait time during this process, so try not to panic too much if it’s already 10 minutes — or even 20 — past seven and you haven’t purchased your season tickets. The days of selling-out in less than five minutes seem to be behind us, thanks to the new ticket sale system that shocked and frustrated seniors this morning.

Associate athletic director of strategic communications Jeff Nelson said the new process was adopted in order to improve the flow of transactions and make the process fairer for students. A tip from Nelson: Don’t refresh your browser or use the back button after you log on and are waiting for your turn.