The silliness of sports

I watched the Super Bowl for only one reason on Sunday: My beloved Kansas City Chiefs were miraculously in it. Fifty year drought. No lie. This was a once in a lifetime event for me and I decided not to miss it.

So, while everyone else on social media was rating the commercials and hyperventilating (in one way or another) about the halftime show, I discovered something: there was an actual football game in progress. Who knew?

And, to top it all off, the team I have loved for decades WON.

My 2020 has been fairly good to this point when it comes to silly sports. (I say that because listening to the rest of you, commercials and halftime shows are WAAAAAYYYY more important to life and culture!)

The Minnesota Gopher football team was IN a New Year’s Day bowl game, then WON the New Year’s Day bowl game. I also grew up loving the Minnesota Vikings and they were in the playoffs and actually beat New Orleans on the road in the first round. (Only to lose to the Niners the next week, which is par for the course in my normal silly sports life.)

And now this.

I’ve followed Joe Posnanski’s writing since his days in Kansas City. I will let him sum up my feelings HERE.

But this paragraph is the real summation:
Pro football is too violent. Pro football is too infatuated with war. Its rules are mostly illogical and they are enforced indiscriminately. There are so many problematic quandaries a football fan must navigate through — or just ignore entirely — but then a great football team comes together like this, a team that dazzlingly blends speed and muscle and heart and guts, and they make you feel emotions that do not have names. 

And in the words of head coach Andy Reid: “How ’bout them CHIIIIEEEEEFFFS!”