The Concord Township pair did it because they didn't want their ceremony to lapse an Ohio State game against Pennsylvania State. And they loved each other.
But as lifelong OSU diehard Joe Damberger lifted his new wife's flowing white gown to remove her garter, their marriage met its first match.
"It was my something blue," Kristen Damberger said of her lacy Michigan garter.
Meet Joe and Kristen, a couple whose relationship goes on the rocks today for the second time since they said "I do" as the Buckeyes and the Wolverines face off in Columbus.
Preparing for her wedding's big Michigan moment, Kristen even arranged for the DJ to play the Michigan fight song.
But the couple laugh as they remember how the DJ quickly interrupted that song to blast "Hang On Sloopy."
"His friends crowded all around me, yelling O-H-I-O," said the member of Michigan's Class of 2000.
The two aren't sure whether he was an OSU fan, but "I don't know, how many people in Ohio aren't OSU fans?" Joe asked. "We don't have too much else in Ohio to root for."
Kristen agreed - being a Michigan fan in Buckeye country is "very lonely."
Even Kristen's family is rooting for Ohio today, she said. Her grandfather and great uncle were both Buckeyes, and she would have been, she said, if the school had her industrial design major.
"It was very difficult," she said. "When Michigan and OSU would play, I did not drive my car around campus because it had Ohio plates. But Michigan made me who I am today."
Excuses, excuses, Joe said: "She defected."
Like his wife, Joe also grew up in Mentor but spent his younger years in Indiana, raised on Notre Dame and OSU.
The couple's love story, as they tell it, began at a bar where Joe worked as a bar back and Kristen kept spilling her beer.
"I knew she went to Michigan," Joe said. "When we first started dating, there was a joke she wasn't allowed to park in our driveway because she had their sticker on her car."
Soon the two were working together at Kristen's family business, Cometic Gasket - full of OSU fans just like Joe.
Jesting on the job continues to this day, but when not sitting on opposite ends of their couch - draped with the appropriate team's fleece blankets, of course - at home, the couple said they rarely notice their rivalry anymore.
"We'll go out and do stuff and have this on," Joe said, pointing to his and hers football garb, "and to us, we don't even think anything of it, but people always talk and stare. It's just every football Saturday, we put our sweatshirts on, and that's the way it is."
Today, the two plan to root for their respective home teams at Panini's in Willoughby, where Kristen accepts the likelihood she'll be the only Michigan alum brave enough to show her true blue and gold colors.
The teasing should make up for last year, she said, when they spent the OSU-Michigan match-up in Ann Arbor, prompting Joe to dig out an old gift he'd received from Kristen's Michigan alum friends.
Those friends, she said, could hardly believe when he walked up wearing their foam Wolverine hat, painted to look like a Buckeyes helmet.
"What makes it most special is it was from Ann Arbor, so I basically defaced something that was sacred to them," he said. "It may need a new paint job this year."
Despite occasional moments of tension, the Dambergers said friendly competition makes marriage fun.
Kristen said she does worry, though, for their 3-year-old golden retriever, Shelby, who may be developing a complex after having her Wolverine bandanna so often removed.
From beneath her Michigan fleece, Joe's wife predicted their future child will play quarterback in Ann Arbor. Kristen's husband smiled to himself, lounging under a fuzzy fleece OHIO.
"I'd rather him go to Notre Dame," he replied.
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