Caring is bad for you

On a molecular level, that sucked. Over here, the Super Bowl began after midnight. And perhaps out of habit, but to be honest, out of superstition, I went to the same Scottish pub near Jokai ter where I'd survived watching the AFC Championship game. When I left the apartment, it was -8 degrees F.  The bar was more crowded, I spent a good two quarters listening to an outrageously, obnoxiously drunk guy babble to anyone who looked at him, and to make the wretched first quarter even worse, the bar managed to run out of chicken wings.

Unless your team truly and visibly sucks from an early point in the schedule, the end of the football season is the most vicious kind of gut punch. It is spread over hours, not days, and there are always it seems a handful of moments on which everything hinged which you can spend your leisure hours mulling over. Pats fans have had a good run of years of putting up with this.

The worst part about the 2011 season is that we got drawn in. No one began this season expecting much, when the big offseason acquisitions were Albert Haynesworth and Chad Ochocinco. No one could have foreseen that Hernandez and Gronkowski would emerge as superstars, or that this random grabbag of a secondary would bend and not break for an entire season. It was only towards the end, when the wins started piling up, when the other big dogs in the AFC started to stumble, and when we began to see weird bounces, shanked opponent field goals, and other explosions of luck to  offset the team's screw-ups that we began to think something was up. It felt, in a bizarre way, like 2001 again. Things were lining up.

And then, you know, nevermind.

I love sports, but do I like being a fan? One thing I enjoy about being over here is getting to watch lots of super high-quality football (that's soccer, in American English) at a reasonable hour. And not having a sincere rooting interest is a kind of bliss. Of course, you pick a favorite on a case by case basis, but you can enjoy what's happening, and leave it when it's over. I can do this with football, with ice hockey here, with cricket. I even did it with water polo for crying out loud last weekend.

There is great joy in detachment. So I pray that I can avoid thinking for a moment about this disaster when I'm finished writing this post. Right.