It’s Monday morning and I’m left wondering, what the hell happened last night?

The Pats…well…the Pats got their asses kicked. It wasn’t even close. Oh the Pats scored 13 points? Didn’t seem like it. I was prepared for a close game, but that game last night, the AFC Championship game between our mighty New England Patriots, led by Tommy Football Brady, and the detestable Baltimore Ravens and their QB1, Blue Hen Joe, that game wasn’t close. It was the slow & stumbling death of the 2012 Patriots.

What the hell happened?

Maybe the one Patriots shirt I own isn’t good luck. And maybe wearing a Red Sox hat during games isn’t good luck either. I bought Sam Adams to drink during the game, but that didn’t seem to help. I even put the bottles in a Red Sox beer coozie. Nothing. I did all I could, but it just wasn’t enough.

Just waking up and frankly, I feel like a train has de-railed in my stomach and all of the animals in the animal car are running wild. That game sucked. Did the season suck? No. The 2012 Pats? No. But last night? Yes indeed. Last night sucked.

So I’m trying to move on the best I can, having already gone through Ryno’s 10 Stages of Sports Grief:

Stage 1: Losing the ability to talk
Stage 2: Despondent pacing
Stage 3: Considering quitting sports fandom
Stage 4: Planning my sports media blackout
Stage 5: Wondering what people who don’t care about sports do
Stage 6: Slowly coming to terms coupled with loose rationalizations.
Stage 7: Watching something funny to dull the pain (more on this in a few)
Stage 8: Reading a “Looking Ahead to Next Year” article
Stage 9: Picking a horse moving forward (49ers)
Stage 10: Forcing myself to look back on the season and to be grateful to route for a team who routinely gets so far (i.e. I could be a Cleveland Browns’ fan)

So moving on and trying to enjoy a day off- you know, maybe a trip to Home Depot, run through some more pages of the Bruce Springsteen biography, go out and see a movie. Distraction moves, stuff to dull the pain. Sports angry, sports disappointed, sports sad. It doesn’t ever get easier watching your team lose, it only gets slightly less painful because over time, you learn that there will be another day, another game, another Patriots’ t-shirt. As long as the Pats have Brady as QB1, they’ll have a punchers chance against anyone. As a fan, that’s really all you can ask for- that your team will have a chance. For the past decade, that’s what the Patriots have given us- hope. And isn’t that what today, Martin Luther King Day and Obama Day, the sequel, all about- hope? I know it’s not the same kind of hope, but it’s hope nonetheless. Apparently we still have poets out there and Richard Blanco, the Inaugural Poet, had a real interesting line- saying that hope is a constellation that we are still drawing out. Is Blanco a football fan? I have no idea. But for a dispirited football, are the words applicable?

They’re applicable enough (and it’s connected to stage 6 of the stages of sports grief: loose rationalizations.)

But there are still a handful of thoughts about last night’s game running through my head I need to work out.

• I think Bill Belichick gets nervous in big games. I really think he does. For the past couple years, the Pats in big games play tighter than my snare drum and the usually balls to the wall Coach Hoodie gets all conservative. I think he’s like a duck swimming- all cool & emotionless above water and a frantic mess under water.
• People just don’t dislike the Patriots, they hate the Patriots. As a Pats’ fan, it’s an ok point to rally around for a little bit. But at some point, it starts to get old.
• Really Twitter? You’re still going to bring up Spygate? Lets be honest, if Spygate were really that much of an advantage don’t you think the Pats’ would have won each of their Super Bowls by more than just one to three points? I think that’s one of the main reasons why I want the Patriots to win so badly, to put the Spygate bullshit to rest. Yes it was stupid & yes it’s a black mark on Belichick’s legacy. But to bring it up after every major loss as the reason why that loss happened is just plain stupid. Move on.
• #welkerdrop – was kind of bummed to see that was already out there.
• I used to like the Ravens, but now? Can’t stand them. Bunch of savages.
• Joe Flacco is not an elite quarterback. He’s a very good one, but not elite. Why? Because I feel the elite designation should be something bestowed upon someone in retrospect, not in real time.
• Ray Lewis killed a guy. Yeah, he killed a guy with a trident. But it’s cool, we’ll have two weeks to hear about how amazing he is and what a magnificent leader he is- both of which are true. But it’s also kind of, sort of true that he bought and ratted himself out of a murder case.
• Go 49ers

So with a few minutes left in the game and really no hope in sight I turned to Loving Wife and asked, “want to watch Ted?” I needed some laughs after three hours of soul-sucking tension & despair. Ted should do the trick. It was after all, roundly viewed as one of the funniest movies of the year. And come on, general consensus can’t be wrong.

Right?

Wrong dude! So wrong!

Thirty minutes in: this is weird.
Fifty minutes in: silence
One hour in: I tonight this would be funnier
A few minutes later: this is pretty stupid
A few minutes after that: want to go to bed? Yup.

That movie was dumb and not funny. Not at all. Marky Mark, you’re better than that.

How come Hollywood doesn’t make genuinely funny movies anymore? I think the last true comedy I watched and enjoyed was Bridesmaids and that was released a year or two ago. Good dramas are a dime a dozen, but comedies are so much harder to come by. I blame the Ravens.

Moving on & things will get better. A carefree Super Bowl will be nice and spring is just around the corner. Thankfully, the lads of DRGN KING have the perfect soundtrack to a day like today- their new album Paragraph Nights.

http://official.fm/playlists/HktI
Let’s go Celtics and we’ll see you next Patriots.

photo by the Boston Herald

Categories: Current Events, Movies, Sports

Tags: bridesmaids, drgn king, mark wahlberg, obama, Patriots, ravens, ray lewis, ted, tom brady