Tuesday, November 4, 2008

MID-SEASON WITH ARLO & JANIS

The missus and I are convinced that we are being spied on by Jimmy Johnson, the creator/author/illustrator of the Arlo & Janis comic strip that runs daily in the Boston Globe. It’s amazing how many times it hits literally close to home. The most recent case in point is this strip from November 1st:
That’s exactly what watching our beloved Fightin’ Irish of Notre Dame football team has felt like for most of this year: I don’t think anyone (except my father, ND class of ’47) expected them to contend for the National Championship. But most people expected they would be competitive and entertaining—and they have been and they are. So win or lose, they can still draw us to dedicate 3 or 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon to waking up the echoes of their last National Championship team—of 20 years ago (ouch). . . . Still, this past weekend’s 4OT loss to Pitt feels like the proverbial bitter pill to swallow: that would have been a nice win to have in the pocket heading into this coming weekend’s lowdown showdown with Boston College, who also lost on Saturday. We’ll have a family entourage—eight of us—at that game . . . despite the weather forecast that may have us literally “shaking down the thunder from the skies.”

Analogously, probably no one (except my father-in-law in Lubbock) expected Texas Tech to be an undefeated contender, so watching them knock off #1-ranked Texas on Saturday night with a high-risk/high-stakes winner-takes-all last-second (literally) touchdown pass (instead of trying a long-ish field goal with 8 seconds left) felt pretty good indeed for those many of us who cheer for the underdog. Texas Tech has been a pleasure ride for their fans all year; I wonder if now that they have reached the pinnacle they will be less “fun” to watch. (Sort of like the Patriots last year: the longer they went undefeated, the more pressure fans felt with every play! No worry about that this year . . . ouch!) Well, we’ll continue to tune in from this address. Go Red Raiders! (For those of you who missed the game, there was this oddity: after their winning touchdown, Tech still had to kick off with 1 second left; because their fans had twice stormed the field, they were penalized—and the kickoff was launched not from the 35-yard-line but from the 7.5 yard line! I’d never seen the likes of that before . . .)

Further analogously, my beloved Boston Bruins won on Saturday night 5-1 over the Dallas Stars in a game that I desperately wish I had been at. The B’s are an interesting team this year for the first time in a while—some good players and some good personalities. Saturday night was one of their biggest scoring outbursts of the season and their biggest margin of victory (last week they won back-to-back 1-0 games and lost 3-2). Moreover, as all the headlines proclaimed on Sunday morning, “old time hockey returned to the Hub” in the form of a couple of serious dust-offs that had me standing and cheering in front of the TV—ah, the good old days when “fisticuffs” and “donnybrook” were household words!