Superbowl Sunday

If you can believe it, Pocket of Bolts and I spent yesterday evening watching the Superbowl. I told this to my mom and she said, "Where did you go?" See, we have TV but no cable, and we only get one channel. Exactly which channel varies depending on what happens to be plugged in to the TV. It turns out that with our new DVD player, the channel we get is NBC (a bit fuzzy), and that happened to be where the Superbowl was playing.

Now neither Pocket of Bolts nor I are great sports fans, but we'd had a tough week, and the Superbowl seemed like a good excuse to eat our favorite sinful meal (pizza and beer) and kick back for four hours. We thought, if we got bored with the game we could always switch over to one of our Netflix. But as it turned out, the game was incredibly exciting!

We had no personal stake in the result at all. Pocket of Bolts was nominally rooting for the Steelers (the Stillers, if you're from Pittsburgh) because he's from the East Coast. I can't maintain any constant loyalties and always tend to be rooting for the offense or the underdog, whichever seems more appropriate. Oh, and for anyone who has long black hair coming out from under their helmet. The Stillers were a classy team, but those Cardinals were really scrappy. We howled and jumped up and down. It was especially humiliating that the Stillers got safetied, but on the other hand, they shouldn't have thrown so many punches at the guys on the other team. Unnecessary roughness indeed! It was a marvelous thing, seeing Harrison's end-zone interception followed by the lumbering hundred yard run for the touchdown. All in all, it was not the slightest bit boring (except for all the ads).

I've noticed this before about football: it works a lot better if you follow the entire game closely from the beginning, because a lot of the pleasure is in the narrative arc. This is unlike continuously played games like basketball or soccer where reverses can and do occur instantaneously. In football, they generally happen in a slower and more formal way, but they are correspondingly more momentous. And of course instantaneous reverse (like fumbles and interceptions) are downright shocking.

Anyway, it's not something I'd want to watch every day or even every week, but it might well become an annual tradition.