the world is tref and grief too astray for tears

I imagine you have heard the terrible news.  That this will take some getting used to is an understatement.  I thought 2006 was bad, not to mention 2007, but this?  Dear lord.  Speaking of 2007, would it have killed the NFC to send up a representing team on the verge of implosion with a quarterback who had completely lost his game in the latter half of the season?  Was that too hard to do a second time?  Goddamn Mannings.  I guarantee you one thing: Eli will never will another Super Bowl.  I don't know if the Patriots will--I expect a lot of changes on the defense after this year, and who knows what the impact will be--but Manning?  Never.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to resume ignoring all news media while lying in a fetal position and moaning.  I do hope to write on other topics today, but I've still got some stages to go through--as this post probably shows, I'm still mired in anger, although there have been moments of bargaining as well.  But don't get me started on the dreams I had in which the Patriots somehow won, all ending with the realization that, oh no, that's right, they lost.  Over and over again.  Blah.

. . . Updating, Jeremy Shockey had an impressive number of glasses on the bar in front of him when the camera cut to show him watching the game.  Not that they were necessarily all his, of course, but it certainly looked like most of them were.  And oh, I think I link to and remark positively on stuff over at the Globe's website often enough to say screw this feature.  Dancing with the Stars?  The Beanpot?  You put this up the morning after the Super Bowl?  WTF?

More: "haven't watched too many games"?  And people complained about bandwagon Patriots fans.

Comments

[Dan]

Sincere condolences from this bandwagon jumper.

How any disinterested parties could have been rooting for that mouth-breather to "come of age" yet again is beyond me.

Then again, I had to be weaned off of my own Pats hatred slowly, as if by tincture, over the past few years.

...

(And 'poof.' Just like that, he's gone. Again.)

[JL]

Dan! Come back!

Reading the above after I posted it yesterday made me realize the haters had at least one thing right: Patriots fans like myself had become what we professed to despise. The comments about Eli may be true, no reason to doubt that they aren't; but it's exactly the sort of thing we heard about our team after they won their first Super Bowl. It's probably inevitable that this sort of conversion takes place after so much success. Still, it's not as if we got beat by some underdog team that was actually appealing or had never won before or something. This was a regularly hyped (although in the past disappointing) group of New York stars, only missing Tiki to be completely insufferable. If it was for the great pass rush, there'd be nothing to respect them for--of course, if it wasn't for the pass rush, they wouldn't have been there. God, I gotta stop, I'm making myself sick again . . .

[Armsmasher]

Surely you've seen this by now. While the conclusions he draws are wrong, it's a great deal of fun for someone such as myself to watch him get arrive at them.

[Armsmasher]

get

[JL]

I started to read it, but then thought, "You know what? Screw Bérubé." I'm just not in the mood for that sort of thing, especially with his positively Easterbrookian use of "Northeast Region" instead of New England. Besides, he rather smugly makes a basic error near the beginning. The fact that the ball was snapped and the punt made in no way made it inappropriate for Belichick to make the challenge. The infraction happened on that play--a challenge would only have become unavailable if the Giants then snapped the ball, starting the next play. I also freely admit to lacking a sense of humor at the moment.

[Armsmasher]

But the problem that Bérubé notes (one, I'm sorry to say, that my living room failed to pick up on at the time, preoccupied as we were with the second-order question of whether a plane violation could merit a personnel penalty) is that Belichick could not challenge the call because there was no call. Absence of a call is not a positive call.

[JL]

He makes both arguments, actually, but he's wrong--NFL rules allow a challenge to ascertain if an illegal number of players were on the field even if no call was made. "Challenge" is perhaps a misleading name for what's involved, I suppose, but there was no impropriety. The Redskins won a challenge in the same circumstances against the Vikings this year. One could argue that the rule should be different, but there's no sense in which it's accurate to say (as Bérubé does) that the Patriots were getting away with something there. It's just the way the game is played. I would think that he'd be happy enough that his team won that he wouldn't have to invent a grievance regarding a drive that, as he notes, didn't result in points or change the game, but I guess it takes all kinds.

[Dan]

Giants win, America loses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1noYVFl-Cnk

[JL]

Oh, Jesus, I started to watch that, saw who was in it and closed the browser. Did I say screw Bérubé? Screw every last one of the '72 Dolphins, hard, especially him. I'll admit that Patriots fans would have gone overboard if New England had won, but no one could be more insufferable than those smug old bastards who played against a level of competition most college programs would be ashamed to admit to.