I spent a thoroughly disagreeable afternoon yesterday watching football. At least, I think it was football. They were dressed like football players. But what they were doing wasn't anything I've seen professional football players do for more than twenty years.
Is this how Jets fans feel?
The New England Patriots may not be looking past this Sunday's game with the New Orleans Saints but the same cannot be said for local pigskin pundits and bobbleheads. There's really nothing else they want to talk about but Tom Brady's return to Foxborough, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers come to town October 3rd, 2021.
Can you blame them?
The four men in charcoal grey suits, with thin black ties and pork pie hats, walked into Jake's Car Works, each one carrying a briefcase. They approached the service desk counter where they were greeted by the owner himself, Jake Weatherbee, a tall, lean man with strong, callused hands and a face was all eyebrows and mustache.
He had made his way to the coast, to the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras. The house and the grounds were empty. This was hardly a surprise. Raleigh was a ghost town, stinking of the dead, of uncollected garbage, of rotting food in empty stores. There were a few survivors, like himself, but he just couldn't think of himself as lucky. He had seen too much death and still feared for his own. Was it crazy to think he was being watched? Was anything crazy in this insane world? Maybe the truth itself was crazy. Knowing the truth. How had he been left to save the world? He didn't know but he had made it this far and as long as he had life, he would hold onto hope...
I can't remember the last time I felt happy after a Patriots loss. Okay, happy probably isn't the right word but I don't feel down, dismayed, disheartened. All right, yes, like most human beings I'm an overseasoned, overcooked stew of emotions. So, yeah, a tablespoon or two of sadness, to taste (it's salty). Maybe I should let Happy Me and Sad Me explain New England's 17-16 loss to Miami.
Power rankings. Projected win totals. Division winners. Playoffs. Super Bowl LVI. Going way out on a limb to predict Patrick Mahomes will win MVP. Pigskin prognostications abound in the run up to the 2021 NFL season. Then Week 1 happens and as with all human endeavors, we are once again reminded that we don't know anything.
Maybe that's a good thing.
