Sunday, January 14, 2007

The Pain and the Pleasure

24-21 Patriots doesn't even begin to cover it.

It would figure, really, that it would take a game like this to get me writing again.

I mean, I spend my last 7 months writing about passion and blood and nationalism and death, and the last months of the Sox season and the entirety of the Pats season might get to seem a little inadequate.

Tom Brady, I love to death in ways incomparable to other mortal men, but William Wallace dying on the block on Tower Hill always has a bit of an edge, don't it.

But then a game like this emerges, and I remember why I do this in the first place.

It really is one of those games which embodies everything in the spectrum of professional sports. How you can be so infuriated, so frustrated, so completely exhausted by such mortal endeavors, and then so enleavened, lifted up, and illuminated at the same time.

The same group of men, who make you scream when they combine to create an intecerption, make you sing with delight at something like Reche Caldwell's 49-yard completion in the fouth quarter.

Those same mortals, who make you bury your head in your hands, as LaDainian Tomlinson strides almost 50 yards to set up a touchdown, make you look towards the heaven, thanking the strangeness of fate on a play like the interception-fumble that set up the game-tying touchdown.

It makes more sense after several quantities of liquor, mostly because right now it's just too incredibly strange to believe.

It could end all next week. It really might, considering the weird luck which combine to carry them to victory. But fate's glass has been refilled, and we live in the weirdness of statistical improbibilty for 7 more days.

this is why I write. this reminds me why I like watching sports. see y'all next week.