A hashtag sweeping across the Northwestern campus over the weekend centered on the Wildcats’ softball team.

For one weekend, the athletic community and alums from across the country took to Twitter to show their support for the Cats using the hashtag of “togetherWEARePURPLE”.

Though NU was unable to beat No. 6 Texas on Sunday to advance to the NCAA Super Regionals, the Cats united this campus in a way usually reserved for football and men’s basketball.

In many ways, this softball team represents the year in NU athletics, with a team that challenged itself from the beginning and battled to the end of the season, squeezing into the postseason. Once there, the softball team proved anything can happen on any given day.

Rarely do I see athletes tweet about sports other than their own, yet over the weekend, basketball players, baseball players, football players and even the wrestling team’s official Twitter account, cheered on the Cats and adopted their hashtag. The unity those 19 characters portrayed got me thinking that maybe this hashtag should be the official slogan of NU athletics.

I know the Cats are “Chicago’s Big Ten Team,” but that is a marketing push from the athletic department to try and sell tickets. I’m talking about making this a rallying cry for all students, athletes, coaches and alums to use to showcase their purple pride. If you think about it, the hashtag, thought up by junior shortstop Emily Allard with capitalization decided upon by the team, encapsulates all that you want in a slogan.

One of the best things about the hashtag is that there are multiple ways to read it. You can read it as “together we are purple,” or “together we wear purple” or simply as “wear purple.” Each interpretation brings a whole new meaning to how we cheer on the Cats.

NU’s official color is purple, and we all wear it to show our school pride. That illustrious mix of red and blue unites us all as students and alumni of this great university. By embracing the togetherWEARePURPLE slogan, we unite with one another under the banner of one of the things that makes our sports teams unique – our color.

The nickname of the Wildcats is a dime a dozen, with nine schools in Division I using that nickname. Meanwhile, there aren’t many other Division I schools with the color purple as their official color. Purple is one of the things that makes NU such a unique school. Evanston has some purple fire hydrants, the clock tower lights up purple after wins, and you never see Pat Fitzgerald not wearing something purple.

So let us embrace the fact that we are purple at NU. We enjoy wearing purple to show our school pride. We are united as a campus by our purple. Alums identify themselves by their purple pride.

Let’s face it, this is the perfect slogan for our university.

Together, we are Purple.