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What About This…? 3.24.2016

By Wayne William Cipriano

For Super Bowl 50 to top Super Bowl 49 it would have had to be a truly fantastic game – and it wasn’t.  But, for those of us who played on the other side of the ball it was a very rewarding game to watch.

An excellent defense (some say the best in the NFL) faced an excel­lent offense (some say the best in the NFL) and settled the question of which is more important, at least for this year, for this game.

A lot of character issues were dis­played on the field. A Hall-of-Fame quarterback who had seen several better seasons and yearned for one last flash of glory before retiring perhaps not at but near the pinnacle of his game was disappointed in that quest but was supported by a team devoted to victory and a coach who should have replaced him but did not.

A newbie quarterback who had essentially never tasted the copper of defeat in his entire career in this sport from Pop Warner to the NFL learned what it is like to be soundly thrashed in the most important game of his life by a team just plain better than his.

Officials rated as the very best in all of professional football, aided by the very best technological advances available to call a game correctly will relive that incomplete catch ruling forever.

But, for us, it was a blast as usual.  Every Super Bowl around our house is a magnificent party and the work involved in its production rivals in complexity if not in participants, the Halftime Show.  The never-ending series of goodies and the omnipres­ent warning to “save some room for…” is the yin/yang all of us weight-watchers abhor.

Thus we start with Halloween, go through Thanksgiving, then Christ­mas, New Years, the Playoffs, and finally the Super Bowl, consuming more food than many small coun­tries in the same time span.  I have some doubts that getting outside and throwing the football around for a few minutes following each of these feasts disguised as a holiday is going to control the inevitable result of such massive caloric intake.

Unfortunately, with a huge crash, sports is over until next fall. The stultifying b-ball games that go on for endless halves settled in the last sixty seconds on the clock but hours in real time (Foul him! Shoot free throw. Foul him! Shoot free throw.  Foul him!….)  The impossibility of convincing anyone not an aficionado of the strategy involved in a baseball game that rivals only soccer for boredom.

But soon, the summer will fade, the leaves will turn, and we will once again hear the gently bump of bubble-wrapped football players colliding softly, protecting one an­other from…pretty much every­thing.

Hey, does anyone know when rugby season starts?