Cue the funeral music, the black clothes, the tears and the somber speeches.
No, it’s not because the Colts blew a halftime lead and Tracy Porter stabbed me straight where my heart used to be and left me (and Colts fans everywhere) with the unbearable pain of a lost Super Bowl.
Okay, so it kind of is.
But most of you out there still lost, even if you don’t know it. Although you may not care about the Colts and Saints, or you may get a sadistic pleasure in Peyton Manning’s pain, or you may just feel good for the rejuvenation of New Orleans, you should still be grieving.
Why?
It is now Feb. 9. The Super Bowl is over. The Pro Bowl–silly and ridiculous as it might be–is over. Even the Senior Bowl and Signing Day are over. We are now staring at over half a year with no football.
I’ll just let the weight of that statement sink in for a moment here. Sure, you may say there are glimpses of football in these intervening months. NFL Draft talk, spring practices in college and training camps are ahead. But when the best thing I have to look forward to is debates over how well Tim Tebow’s game will translate to the pros (it won’t, sorry to break it to you), I can’t really count that as football.
I’m sure lots of you aren’t approaching the heart attack levels that I am over the lack of football in our future. You are just sitting back and thinking of the other sports you love–maybe football being over isn’t such a bad thing. I love other sports too, and I’d just love to agree and shift my attention to other sports. But for me, other sports just aren’t cutting it right now.
The main sport on the minds of Americans right now is basketball (sorry, NHL fans). Stanford basketball, as much as I love it, is not the most fun to watch at the moment. The women are amazing and dominant, but no matter what they do now, we’re all just waiting for their seemingly inevitable matchup with UConn for all the marbles. So it’s hard to get too excited over another Pac-10 thrashing. The men, on the other hand, seem to be in close games every week. The only problem there is that they can’t win those games. Landry Fields is great to watch, and when Jeremy Green is on his game, you can see glimpses of hope. But last-minute losses and a winless road record in the Pathetic-10 fail to get me too excited.
What about the NBA? LeBron and Kobe battling it out, Dwight Howard making circus dunks, Kevin Garnett fighting for every basket…and that’s just the commercials. Well, unfortunately, the NBA can’t seem to create better entertainment in its games than in its commercials. Sure, there are highlights–dunks and buzzer-beaters are never hard to come by. But any true basketball fan has to shiver with fear when turning on an NBA game, even one without Charles Barkley’s commentary. The NBA has become more and more like a playground, so that now a player getting randomly slapped in the head at the buzzer and a “superstar” taking five steps on a routine drive are commonplace. The new “peak” of basketball is LeBron holding the ball and jab-stepping for 23 seconds and throwing up a turnaround 40-footer. Sure, it’s impressive when he makes it, but I find it hard to equate that to a two-minute drill in football or even a really good end of curling (yeah, it’s actually called an end).
So basketball isn’t giving me much besides March Madness, which is always fun but means a lot more when Stanford is in contention. And while I might watch a bit of the Finals, I must say I’m in the 99.9 percent of the population that doesn’t really care about hockey. I try, I really do, but it’s hard to get into it.
What does that leave? The Olympics are fun, but they’re still the Winter Olympics, so I may actually have to live up to my promise of watching curling. Tennis can be fun, but Nadal is hurt and no one else has shown the ability to beat Federer consistently when it counts. Golf…the fact that I’m even talking about it says enough about how bored I’ll be. And who’s going to watch golf without Tiger? There’s always baseball, but games that count are over a month and a half away, and the stretch run is still far in the distance.
Which leaves me plenty of time to replay Sunday’s fourth quarter in my mind. Over and over again.