LET IT PAIN!
Playoff heartache still beats no playoffs at all
IF YOU didn’t have a genuine horse in the race (non-gambling edition), then maybe — maybe — by the time midnight struck and Sunday became Monday you were able to exhale, catch your breath and fully appreciate what the previous 33 or so hours had delivered. Maybe — maybe — you were able to close your eyes and drift into blissful slumber.
There was no such respite for the poor citizens of Buffalo, where this weekend takes an instant and rightful place upon a heaping pile of sporting calamity; or in Green Bay, where they will spend the next few decades wondering how 30 years of Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers yielded only two Super Bowls; or Nashville, where folks waited two years for Ryan Tannehill to turn back into Ryan Tannehill, and Ryan Tannehill didn’t disappoint.
(If there was similar angst in Tampa … seriously, just pipe down. You got to watch the GOAT the last two years. You have backto-back Stanley Cups. You have the Rays to look forward to. Also? It was 69 and sunny there Monday afternoon. Read the room.)
Ring up another win for the NFL, which always seems to figure out a way to remind us why we can’t ever quit pro football, no matter how mad we may get at the sport, the commissioner, the players. Around here, there were either of two ways to look at the NFL’s divisional playoff weekend, both at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum:
1. My God, the Jets and the Giants are about five years away from even pondering playing professional football at that level … pass the whiskey bottle.
2. So that’s what we’ve been missing. And ain’t it fun to dream?
“I’m tired of the underdog narrative,” Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow said after Cincinnati’s 19-16 win at Tennessee led off the weekend proceedings. “We’re a really, really good team. We’re here to make noise.”
All due respect to Burrow — who has single-handedly overturned three decades of wretched Bengals history in two years — and to the Bengals, who have now won twice as many playoff games in two weeks as they had going back to 1988, they aren’t merely underdogs.
By the end of the weekend, they were a footnote.
By the end of the weekend, social media had been littered with dozens of versions of the same Rodgers joke — “Second time this year we all thought he had a shot!” was the gist — and football fans had to come to terms with the possibility that the sleeper team is also a team with four Lombardi Trophies to its name.
“You’re a f--king legend, man!” 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo yelled at kicker Robbie Gould after Gould booted the Niners to a 13-10 win at the gun at Lambeau Field. “F--k the Packers!”
It took awhile, but even the eloquent Garoppolo and his mates soon faded into the ether as the games resumed Sunday, as it seemed as if the Rams were going to throttle the Buccaneers up and down Raymond James Stadium, as it seemed Tom Brady — was this really going to be his swan song? — was going down in the dirt one last ignominious time …
And then …
And then …
And then, on cue, the Buccaneers weren’t dead because the GOAT said they weren’t. Well, and the Rams — who needed to botch things up 15 different ways to let Tampa Bay back in the game — allowed all 15 of those things to happen. Brady wasn’t on the field for any of LA’s four fumbles. In theory, anyway. But he was certainly in every one of their heads …
Until, after Brady and friends had somehow turned 27-3 into 27-27, someone forgot to cover Cooper Kupp, who may well be the most valuable player in the whole league. If only someone could build an app to combine sodium pentothal and a cartoon thought bubble and place it atop Brady’s head as those final few seconds played out ...
I’d pay for that.
What we got instead was: “It’s the reality of football.”
But that was OK, too. Because four hours after declaring the Rams’ 30-27 win — third time in three games to that point a gamewinning field goal at the gun decided things — one of the great games ever, even that had become mere prologue.
Because then Chiefs 42, Bills 36 happened.
There will be time aplenty this week (and, probably, the two weeks thereafter) to celebrate Kansas City. This game, right now, is about Buffalo. It is why, if you have a friend in Western New York, you immediately fired off a “Proof of life?” text Sunday night.
It is why you had to call those friends Monday morning. And before you could even ask, the answer was:
“1. Wide right.
2. THIS $#%#&*^#%# GAME.
3. Music City Miracle.”
Before long, someone had come up with the perfect name for this one from the Buffalo point of view — “Appalling 13” — and those of us in New York were left to wonder: In a weekend like this, as much as it might help bad tickers and sour stomachs, is it really better to not have a dog in the hunt? I say no.
You may get a different answer today in Buffalo, in Nashville, in Green Bay. And maybe even in Tampa, too. Although the sun helps.