IRENE, South Africa – College student Robby Donoho watched Landon Donovan’s golden goal on Wednesday and decided it merited an instant tribute. Little did he know, within hours it would wind up bringing the United States soccer hero, flicking through the Internet half a world away, to tears.

Donoho, a 21-year-old Purdue University senior and avid fan of the men’s national team, collected a montage of clips of USA fans celebrating Donovan’s injury-time winner against Algeria and assembled them into a catchy package, which he put on YouTube.

Within hours, the video had gone viral, and as the American players headed to bed on Friday night ahead of their round-of-16 match against Ghana in Rustenburg, more than 350,000 viewers had tuned in.

It didn’t take long for the images to be passed through to the USA’s training camp near Pretoria and onto the laptop of Donovan himself. For all of the praise and plaudits the goal-scoring star received after his moment of glory, it was seeing the reaction sparked by his calm strike into the bottom corner of the Algerian net that touched him the most.

“Not sure if you guys saw this but it brings tears to my eyes every time,” Donovan wrote on his Facebook account, while linking to Donoho’s video. “Thank you all so much … we can do it.”

This past weekend, we reported that a campaign was underway at Ole Miss to make Admiral Ackbar the university’s new mascot. As geeked out as we were by the possibility of the beloved, squidlike Star Wars Rebel Alliance Commander of “It’s a trap!” fame leading a different set of Rebels on the playing field, we were skeptical that students would want to oust their current plantation-owning semi-mascot, Colonel Reb.

Well, color us happily surprised: an early report from TMZ on yesterday’s voting says that Ackbar is currently the “favorite” among the student body.TMZ:

Tuesday, the students voted in favor of crowning a new mascot to represent Rebel Nation … and the favorite so far is none other than the most famous Mon Calamari in the entire universe.

Several pro-Ackbar websites have recently emerged — making the Admiral the heavy favorite. The University tells us the decision on the mascot is entirely in the hands of the student mascot committee. The University will hold a vote in the near future — we’ll keep you updated.

As Gamma Squad points out, even a unanimous student body vote for Ackbar might run into complications: namely, George Lucas‘ protective guarding of his every creation. See: the Motorola Droid, whose creators had to pay Lucas for the rights to use the word “droid” — it’s unlikely that Ole Miss will cough up that sort of coin. But in this case, we’re hoping against hope that this campaign can upset the imperial fleet and secure Endor, or at least a bunch of tailgates.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has temporarily renamed Manhattan "Revis Island" in honor of the All-Pro cornerback as Darrelle Revis and the Jets prepare to face the Colts on Sunday afternoon.