- A safety, a pick-6, a rushing touchdown from the 1 set up by an endzone pass interference call, a successful 2-point conversion, a few field goals, a kickoff return for a TD, that amazing ballet of spinning broken tackles executed by Jermaine Kearse; the final score may have been lopsided but within those 51 total points it was a case study in the many and varied ways you can put points on the board in the NFL. Considering how at most Super Bowl parties there’s always somebody there who doesn’t know much about football but is genuinely trying to deepen their own understanding of the rules, last night provided no shortage of object lessons.
- In the same vein, when Seattle got that first safety (I was going to say “scored” but that seems too active, since Seattle didn’t do much of anything on the play: the Bronco’s center snapped it too high, the Bronco’s QB failed to stop it from going by his head, and a Bronco fell on the ball in the end zone to prevent a defensive fumble recovery for a touchdown. So.) a total of 12 seconds had elapsed off the game clock. A bunch of us at the party started discussing whether or not we had just witnessed what would be an unbreakable record for fastest score in a Super Bowl. Of course the hypothetical of a coast-to-coast kickoff return came up, and then there was some debate as to whether or not that play could unfold in 12 seconds or less. How incredibly accommodating of Percy Harvin to demonstrate a couple hours later, at the start of the second half, that he could in fact run a kickoff back in … 12 seconds! And Harvin is good, but probably not the fastest return specialist we’ll ever see. So get those prop bets ready for next year, y’all!
- That Harvin TD was something my wife and I heard on the car radio, as we drove home from the party after taking our leave during halftime. It was an old-school multimedia night for us!
Mostly I bring this up to mention that my wife has an absolutely killer ability to find sports on the radio, and that is yet another of the myriad reasons why I am so crazy about her.
So yeah, we left the party early (though it felt much later than it was). And we left on account of our children, although that’s not to say they were in any way failing to live up to our expectations for public behavior (or that they were the proximate cause of our closer-to-midnight feelings of fatigue). We simply stuck to The Plan, involving getting to the party early, hanging out and enjoying ourselves for the first half, and then changing the kids into pajamas and hitting the road during halftime so that the kids would all be home in their beds reasonably close to their usual bedtimes. The most static came from the little guy, who is getting old enough to understand that when we leave a party that’s still going on, he is consequently missing out on the fun that others are continuing to have. (Sorry, little guy, them’s the breaks.)
Which means the baby was just about as good as we could have hoped for. In fact, we had a birthday party to attend on Saturday evening in honor of a little boy who lives two houses down from us and, when the weather is nice, often plays with both our little guy and our little girl. My wife and I were a little nervous about how that might throw off whatever scant progress we were making on the baby’s sleep habits, but after we got home Saturday and got everyone ready for bed, the baby slept fine (i.e. one of those nights where any wakings and re-settlings were early and/or brief enough that it goes down in the ledger as basically sleeping through the night). And then the baby was even better last night: fell asleep in the car on the way home, woke up only halfway or so while being extricated from his car seat, got a bottle and fell back asleep, and stayed that way the rest of the night. The little girl also fell asleep on the way home and was very uneventfully transferred straight to her bed. Again, only the little guy gave us any grief, which came down to a combination of lingering resentment over leaving early and some minor disputes over what he needed to do before climbing into bed, since the usual eveningtime script had been temporarily suspended.
Truth be told, the family member who slept the worst last night was probably me, and I have no one to blame for that but myself. A little too much beer, waaaaaay too much chips and salsa and buffalo wings and mozzarella bites and whatever else strayed a little too close to my mouth. I woke up around three a.m. feeling slightly out of sorts both mentally and metabolically (in our family we generally label this “the meat sweats”) but managed to catch a few more zzz’s before the alarm clock heralded a new work week.
And Mondays here at the blog are usually dedicated to talking about work, but I’ve taken all this time to detail the preceding weekend because there’s not much to say on the job front right now. I’m kind of trying to get through today with a minimum of energy expended, since any exertion feels like an overexertion. I’m about halfway there! Tomorrow I’m sure I’ll be back to normal, or close enough (unless the baby decides that giving us a break over the weekend was kindness enough, and has an epic non-stop overnight freakout tonight, but there’s really no way of knowing until we get there).
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